War and Military Journalism

With few exceptions, the American public supports the country's armed forces at the onset of war—and so have American news media. War's early stages encourage patriotic sentiment, a phenomenon known as rallying around the flag. New York editor Horace Greeley (1811–72) famously called for the invasion of the Confederacy by placing “Forward to Richmond!” in the masthead of the New York Tribune at the start of the Civil War in 1861. In 1898, New York press barons William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) and Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) clamored for hostilities with Spain during the two months between the mysterious destruction of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor and the congressional declaration of war. Rarer is the case of the press achieving peace despite public support for war. One example occurred in 1895, when Pulitzer's New York World editorialized against efforts by Congress and President Grover Cleveland to intervene in a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. While the majority of American newspapers echoed the government's talk of possible war with Britain, Pulitzer defused the crisis by publishing telegrams of good will from British government and church officials.

Passions for war erode with time, both among the public and the news media. Lengthy wars are difficult to justify to a large and heterogeneous nation with a continuing strain of isolationism in some quarters. It is equally difficult to long sustain a belligerent mood among civilians whose lives are little affected by distant conflicts. Although the connection between war news and public opinion is complex and not yet fully understood, extended combat provides journalists with prolonged opportunities to portray war's violence, scandal, heroism, and human error, as well as to raise questions about strategy and tactics, all of which become linked with shifts in public attitudes.

World War I proved an aberration. The press and public were slow to support American belligerence, even after Congress voted overwhelmingly for a declaration of war in April 1917. America had supported neutrality, and President Woodrow Wilson had won a second term in 1916 by campaigning on the theme of having kept the United States out of war. In the first six weeks after the congressional declaration, only 73,000 Americans volunteered for service. Wilson responded with a campaign to mobilize public opinion. The federal Committee on Public Information, which Wilson created, fomented prowar attitudes by distributing thousands of press releases and millions of propaganda pamphlets and posters, and by censoring unpleasant news of the war in Europe. According to photography historian Susan Moeller, the military and government suppressed all civilian combat photography during World War I because they realized the danger to morale posed by images of trench warfare, gas attacks, and wide-scale devastation. The combination of censorship and propaganda created anti-German hysteria by war's end in 1918.

Images, more than the printed or spoken word, are credited with significantly impacting audiences' interpretations of war. “The transformation of mass calamity into individual people and incidents arrests the viewers,” Moeller noted. “Through photography, [Page 1436]war becomes personal and comprehensible—more than just grand patriotic schemes and unintelligible statistics” (Moeller 1989, 377). The press and public hailed the government's release of photographs of casualties halfway through World War II as a worthy documentation of the nation's sacrifice. Two decades later in the Vietnam War, video, film, and photographic images of combat and its victims had a different result, feeding a growing debate over conduct of the war. While only 26 percent of Americans opposed sending troops to South Vietnam in March 1966, 60 percent did so by January 1973. Many military and government officials blamed television in particular—the Vietnam War was the first to be extensively covered by TV network correspondents (critic Michael Arlen dubbed it “The Living Room War”)—for the loss of public support. The U.S. Army, however, noted in its official history of the war that rising casualty rates had a greater impact than television on public opinion. According to the official Army history, in the Korean and Vietnam wars, each increase of a factor of ten—from a hundred casualties to a thousand, from a thousand to ten thousand, and so on—prompted a decrease of 15 percentage points in public support for the war (Hammond 1996, 262).

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