The Young Man and Journalism

by Chester Sanders Lord

All of the London newspapers made the most elaborate preparations to report the war. Those of the Times were perhaps the most comprehensive and may serve as illustration. It sent ninety correspondents to the army fronts scattering them all along the lines. They were, in the main, high priced men and the expenditure amounted to something like fifteen thousand dollars a week. But the censors shut them out entirely. They were not allowed within miles of the fighting lines and were forbidden to send a scrap of news. It was useless to keep them there and they were recalled. The only news printed in London, Paris, or Berlin, at first, were the government reports.

It was in response to public clamor for more news that a new plan of war reporting was adopted, namely, the syndicating of news. Very few correspondents were permitted on the firing line and each man represented a number of newspapers. In 1918, for example, as many as eight or ten English newspapers shared the work of one man. Reuter’s agency had a man at all fronts. His reports went to all newspapers. This was a great service and also a great saving to the smaller sheets; but the big newspapers wanted their own men to do their work.

In London, a combination of all the daily papers was formed, called the Newspaper Proprietors Association, and it made virtually all arrangements for reporting the war. If a member had in mind a good thing to do he was required by the arrangement to tell it to all the others, for nothing could be done except under this cooperative scheme. These conditions destroyed all competition. Newspaper “beats” disappeared. It was a very unsatisfactory arrangement. There was no freedom of movement for individual publications. And it is more than likely that a similar system will prevail in future wars. No room, no facilities for several hundred correspondents are to be had at the field headquarters of a fighting army. The number must be restricted and the news passed around to all newspapers.

In the latter months of the war, conditions, as compared with the first months, were reversed. Censorship was relaxed somewhat and correspondents were allowed to approach the battle lines with greater freedom. The syndicating plan was not changed. It worked more smoothly as the writers had more liberty but it was not ever satisfactory to the newspapers. The feeling of resentment toward the presence of correspondents in the field somewhat passed away. The writers who kept faith and observed the censorship rules were made more welcome. But army officers never have been reconciled to the presence of correspondents and doubtless never will be.

It was difficult for the newspapers to obtain quick news of the war for reasons already mentioned, yet, reviewing the months of the conflict, it is difficult to recall any serious misrepresentation of facts or conditions. We understood always, with substantial accuracy, how many men each power had in the field, where the armies were gathered, what the losses were, what advantages had been gained or surrendered, and substantially how things were going.

The war was not reported with especial brilliancy until just before its end. In the closing months some very fine work was done, but until then dull routine narration was the vogue. Censorship, the syndicate requirement, the never ceasing congestion of the wires, the compelled reduction in the size of newspapers, were the chief causes for the moderation. A correspondent who knows that his matter is to be cut and slashed two or three times by censors before it reaches his editor loses much of the inspiration to brilliant work.

For the first time in any war, correspondents were compelled to wear a uniform—the ordinary officers’ uniform without any mark or rank, but with a green brassard around the left upper arm. Each correspondent was compelled to provide himself with everything needed in the field including his transport which meant motor car and horses. It has been estimated that the correspondent’s expenses were about eight hundred dollars a month. The correspondents were paid from four thousand to ten thousand dollars a year salary, three or four of especial reputation getting more than the latter sum.

The war involved vast additional expense to newspapers. The cost of maintaining men in the field and in news centers, the cost of transmitting dispatches, especially through the cables, as well as the enormously increased price of every product that entered into newspaper construction helped to swell the total. The increase in the price of printing paper alone cost our newspapers of large circulation an additional eight hundred thousand dollars or nine hundred thousand dollars a year. Instead of paying from seven to ten cents a word for cable transmission, as before the war, the press paid latterly twenty-five to thirty-five cents from London and Paris. Some papers paid as much as one thousand dollars for single dispatches and frequently expended ten thousand dollars a week for the transmission of war reports. In the Gallipoli drive, messages were sent to Constantinople by automobile, thence wired to Vienna, relayed to Berlin, relayed again to The Hague and again to London, whence cabled to America at a total cost of about a dollar and a half a word. Yet we failed to note any relaxation of effort or of expense on the part of American newspapers to get the news. It is an axiom of the business that the very life of the sheet depends on a lavish expenditure for the purchase of information. The big newspapers were compelled to have special correspondents in all the big centers of allied, belligerent and neutral countries, to cover the political situation and other things arising from the administrative state of the war. For example, Holland was the center of German news, being on the frontier and on the main route. Here, naturally, a man obtained the big German news first of all, the German newspapers, the narratives of persons passing from Germany. Switzerland was a news center of almost equal importance for the same reasons. Sweden and Norway had to be covered. It was very trying for the newspapers, very expensive.

In reporting the great war the newspapers were under great disadvantage in consequence of the censorship. It was the more exacting in the European cities, for there it included the censorship of comment as well as news; but much more important war news was permitted to pass through the Atlantic cables than was permitted to be published in London, Paris, or Berlin. Nevertheless, every cable message, every mail letter to America was carefully scrutinized. The letters found objectionable were destroyed; the cables were changed or suppressed at the censor’s will. Dispatches from Paris to America by the way of London were censored in Paris and again in London and also on arrival in America. Messages from Vienna were censored in that city, in Berlin, in London and again in America. But with our entrance into the war all messages from Germany and Austria ceased, practically. At the time Servia was crushed, American correspondents telegraphed some fifteen thousand words describing the conquest, not one word of which reached New York. The reports reached London and were held there because thought to be news damaging to the cause of the allies. An American correspondent early in the war sent four reports of the Champagne advance. One third of one of them was delivered. Other correspondents had the same experience at this time.

In justification of censorship and in appeal to the press for its aid, the War College in Washington, in the late war, cited instances of mischief done in other campaigns. In the Crimean War the English newspapers gave the Russians most valuable information about the nature of the trenches and the condition of the armies. Wellington complained that the English press gave to Napoleon full details of his troops and movements. The result of the battle of Sadowa, in the Austro-Prussian War, was largely determined by a report in the London Times which told that the Austrians were encamped on the right bank of the Elbe. Napoleon’s letters from St. Helena attested that he kept accurate track of the movements of the English fleets and armies by London newspaper reports. The English had always given him credit for a crafty spy system, not appreciating that the letters of English officers which filled the newspapers, were a part source of his information. In the Franco-Prussian War the French journals gave the Prussians full particulars of McMahon’s concentration at Châlons, his march to Rheims, and his advance to the Meuse. The Prussians so directed their army movements that the French surrender at Sedan was forced. The advance of the French army for the relief of Bazine at Metz, the success of which depended on secrecy, became known to the Prussians through the French and English newspapers. In our own Civil War, General Sherman’s famous march through Georgia to the sea was largely directed by newspaper reports and by President Jefferson Davis’s speeches explaining how Sherman was to be cut off, which were printed in the Southern press. And the War Office warning told how in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the success of the American expedition that concentrated at Tampa was seriously menaced. Every military movement was reported in our newspapers and the Spanish Government had within a few hours complete accounts of the American preparations for war.