The Shape of the News

by T. H. THOMAS

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ONE of the first casualties of the Hitler war has been the legend built up in previous years as to the overwhelming power of wartime propaganda. At no time during the Great War, in reality, did propaganda reach the intensity or the dominant position achieved by this process of “eye-opening” during the years of morbid post-mortems that followed. Never during the war did it attempt to create so false and unreal a set of historical fictions. The unquestioning convictions thus built up deserve, in fact, to stand as the outstanding achievement of propaganda. Among the post-war generation there resulted the paralyzing belief that the thing would necessarily repeat itself in a future war: on the firing of the first shot the human intelligence would automatically pass under the anesthetic of “wartime propaganda.” As things turned out, the spell of this belief was shattered suddenly even during the last few weeks of peace.

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939; the instant partitioning of Poland; the swallowing up of the Baltic states by Stalin with Hitler acquiescing; the Soviet attack on Finland — all this complex of swift surprises was not merely surprising in itself: it belonged to the general pre-war category of things which definitely could not happen.

The general structure of beliefs built up at home and abroad by the long propaganda effort of the totalitarian states collapsed under this first blow. Leaders in the fight against Nazi ideas were hardly less taken aback than the most ardent partisans of the Soviet; all the familiar patterns of facts and theories, of loyalties and hatreds, were suddenly tumbled into fragments. After so thumping a fall it was never possible to put Humpty Durnpty together again, and the post-mortem propaganda attempted in these countries has amounted to no more than a caricature of its former self.

Among the democracies, stunning military defeats rapidly withered away the raison d’être of whatever formal and systematic propaganda may have been preparing. (In this matter, these countries were caught no less unprepared than in the task of rearmament.) Extreme and imminent danger leaves little need for abstract justifications; and with German bombers hovering overhead, what men are fighting for becomes fairly obvious. There was no need of encouragement from official quarters, and since Dunkirk the main task in Britain has been to restrain rather than stimulate the temper of popular opinion.

The official propaganda agencies assembled in Washington during the summer of 1941 were based chiefly on the pre-war conceptions. By a curious anachronism, we plunged into building up, on an unprecedented scale, the type of thing that had become patently obsolete ever since the outbreak of the war. (It was as if General McNair had set up as a training model for the new army the trench warfare techniques in vogue in the year 1916.) The immense mushrooming of these new services, plus the personnel gathered by the government bureaus in recent years, has now built up a total manpower dedicated to publicity and propaganda estimated at about thirty thousand. This is a strength equal to the army Grant put into the field in one of the decisive battles of the Vicksburg campaign — Champion Hill.

Yet the effect of all this was to make the press sharply allergic to the vitamins offered by these official services. The press correspondents at Washington turned first to scorn, and then to open hostility. From the point of view of the general public, the press itself — for better or worse — became the main line of resistance to the propaganda offered by the official handouts. Whatever their character, these offerings seem to have been no more than a microscopic factor in shaping the news or influencing public opinion. Instead, the press and the public may be said to have coöperated in creating their own new types of propaganda.

From Dunkirk onward, the political credit of the Churchill Government has rested not on its ability to create a propaganda picture of favorable prospects, but on its readiness to face the most unpleasant facts bluntly and candidly. This same tribute has not always been paid to our own public, but the President’s position in the eyes of his countrymen has never been stronger than at the time of his radio address after Pearl Harbor — the message that began with the words: “The news is all bad. ...”

Our press from the first has held out pious warnings against the mere thought of a Government seeking to regiment public opinion. After six months of war, we have learned what can happen when the press itself takes over the task of forming public opinion. It has remained a free and unregimented press: quite spontaneously it has volunteered its services in a public-spirited and patriotic impulse. Yet it has chosen — spontaneously — the mission of presenting the news in a rousing and heartening fashion; it has dealt with the news as an instrument for keeping up national morale.

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In their broadcasts to France and other occupied countries, the British learned the lesson early in the day that the one thing to avoid above all others was to offer readymade opinions or pleasing interpretations of the course of the war. Factual news of the war was eagerly listened to, but the French radio audience would no longer tune in for pep talks, predictions, or promises of what the Allies were going to do. The hunger for facts was such that even unpleasant facts had to be candidly stated — and the British broadcasters soon found that the credit they enjoyed in France was in direct proportion to the accuracy of their statements. The French, in short, wanted news and information of any sort — but they did not want to be told what to believe or think.

What if this regime were tried out for a time in the United States? Is there any reason to suppose that American readers would welcome it any less keenly than the public in France?

Following a very similar regime, Elmer Davis made himself the best and most valued “teller” of war news throughout the country. For his discerning eye a fiveminute period was more than enough, and very often it brought out essential points that were lost or buried in next morning’s paper. Looking back over the memory of his 8.55 P.M. since the outbreak of our war, it is fairly clear that we have had nothing to complain of on the score of news being held back by the censorship. The readers of the press have suffered from a wholly different evil.

The editorial pages have ranged from one extreme to the other, in the matter of quality. In the average paper, the well-known columnist tends to dim out more and more the editorial writer. Yet in the South, even in smaller cities, the writers of editorials still have a way of doing their own thinking, and are able to offer things that deserve careful reading. In the North, the tendency is rather to join vigorously in the prevailing chorus; but on occasions discriminating comment comes forward. The general scope of the news in our best papers is broader than that offered by any paper in Britain; the amount of war news alone is far greater. The daily situation maps in the New York Times are in a class by themselves, and no European paper during the Great War offered anything to compare with them. Taking news and editorials together, the New York Times and the New York HeraldTribune today offer more to their readers than any paper in England. Yet . . .

In the painful convalescence of the occupied countries after the close of the war, it was observed that the “good money” gradually brought into circulation thrust aside automatically the many types of worthless paper the Germans had issued. In our daily experience of the press and the radio, however, the process is reversed. A triumphant headline or a single article of rosy optimism will effectively smother the facts offered in other columns by carefully written foreign dispatches, or by any number of carefully weighed editorials.

The Russian winter campaign, in turn, was developed in such a way as to leave most readers with a thoroughly false idea of the net balance of the situation on the Russian front, and a quite fictitious estimate of the prospects for 1942. The same thing has happened in England. All in all, the press in both countries has helped public opinion to refuse to face the facts of Allied military weakness and the actual military situation which is the consequence. It has helped to sustain the demands for “decisive action” and prompt success, when the actual balance of forces made clear that we should be lucky to maintain our ground on the defensive. It has flaunted obviously fanciful visions such as the annihilation of the paper cities of Japan. It has encouraged every tempting unreality.

In all this matter, it seems fair to say that the better papers have kept two sets of books. They have offered fact and fancy side by side and simultaneously — with the general policy of Mr. Facing-Both-Ways. The popular press has been wholly on the buoyant side, and has centered its efforts upon headlines of the cheer-leader type. But most readers, also, do not read far enough to counteract the impression the headlines give; and the note of triumph sounded day after day by stirring captions remains the dominant note.

Months before the fall of Tobruk, the Illustrated London News made clear in detailed drawings that the German tanks in Libya were faster and far more heavily armed than the British. (This was due, no doubt, to various technical difficulties with mass production in British factories.) One of the soundest British military writers, Cyril Falls, pointed out in these same pages that the policy of the RAF to stress the building of giant bombers had left the troops in the field and the ships at sea without the protection of dive bombers. He noted also that this policy was no casual error: it represented a formal decision of the Government. Military and naval commanders in the field have to work with the tools given them: they become the victims of any wrong decision on major policies at Washington or London.

All this gave a clear warning of the risks ahead; and later on, the fact that Rommel sallied forth on the offensive offered at least a hint that he might have assembled superior forces. Yet the outcome was received (both in Britain and America) with an air of complete surprise; and the press turned once again to the old clichés of bungling leadership and inferior British staff work.

When our turn comes, shall we indulge in the false emotion of pouring scorn upon commanding officers guilty of the sin of having to face a stronger and better-armed enemy?

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As far as the press is concerned, these misleading pictures have been due not to any desire to mislead but rather to a mistaken form of good intentions. From the very first, the press and the radio have volunteered as active participants in the war. They have assigned themselves the mission of arousing the country’s support—almost as if the press were carrying on the war and the country were standing aloof as a spectator. In thus shouldering the responsibility for national morale, the proper roles have become directly reversed. If it is a public duty to present things in glowing colors, anything short of this becomes almost a moral lapse, and any reminder of difficult realities is rejected as “pessimistic.”

This conception of the task in hand reaches down to the correspondents at the front and in the home sectors. Visits to training camps or overseas bases, tours of inspection in dockyards or munition plants, and even firsthand accounts of actual fighting by land or sea — in the reports we get of all these, there is a minimum degree of description and facts and an unlimited outpouring of praise. This tendency was apparent even in 1918, but in the intervening years the techniques of publicity have swept over the country in an all-embracing flood. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force, production, the fighting fronts, the whole scope of our effort in the war, are presented with the methods (and rather in the spirit) of a publicity drive launching some new commercial product — a drive conceived on an unprecedented scale. These devices are all too familiar to a long-suffering public, and their net result is the attitude of resignation and skeptical distrust summed up in the phrase: “The press is trying to sell us the war.”

It is a thoroughly unpromising attitude of mind. President Conant has warned against the danger of Utopian visions as to the postwar settlement. The nearer danger is our Utopian conception of the present situation in the war.

This conception — by one impulse and another — has been steadily pressed upon the country ever since Pearl Harbor. Rather prematurely, it reached the fantastic climax of optimism which the President tried to quash last May by an abrupt word of warning.

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In the reaction of the press to the President’s warning, the reply was made that under wartime conditions of censorship and control the Government was primarily responsible for the trend and color of the news in print. Anne O’Hare McCormick, in her column in the New York Times, argued that even the changing moods of opinion were the direct expression of this government control:

“. . . if the country veers from overoptimism to overpessimism, it is on the basis of news and statements released by official sources.” (Herr Goebbels would be gratified if his own drastic efforts were rewarded by so sweeping a tribute as this.) In arguing this same case, Arthur Krock pointed out that war news comes either from official sources or from independent press reports which have to be submitted for censorship. “The consequence is that, except for headlining and placement, the news of the war is a government product.”

Headlines, however, are the most important factor in the equation, and the headlines are the things we have most to complain of. Some of us follow Mr. Krock’s column with close attention, but nine out of ten readers gain no other impression of daily events than those displayed by “headlining and placement.” The government product does not include this essential factor of display and selection, or the frequent omission of critical points, or the write-up which ordinarily gives the visible color to the items of news selected.

Nor does the censorship review the syndicated columns, the editorial pages, the interpretations of innumerable military experts and technical specialists of various sorts — or the flood of views and comment poured forth day by day by Washington correspondents and feature writers throughout the country. Docs the censor stand by, ready to clap his hand over the mouth of Raymond Gram Swing? Does his organization reach out through the country so as to pass on the utterances of hundreds of local radio commentators whose daily broadcasts strive above all to catch the lastminute flashes? Does the censor guide the course of Time and Life and the illustrated weeklies ?

These workmen, by and large, draw their daily sustenance from the grapevine and gossip which never approaches the censor, or else from the process of dressing up the news which has already appeared in the morning paper. In these efforts at reinterpretation, they borrow liberally from each other: it is much like the small French town observed by Henry James, where the inhabitants subsist by taking in each other’s washing.

These efforts, rather than the “news and statements released by official sources,” have shaped our changing moods in regard to the war. Their guiding impulse asserted itself long before the censorship came into being. In the almost forgotten period of the phony war, the maps on the front page showed the Maginot Line extending north clear to the Channel, and military experts affirmed quite simply that the French Army amounted to perhaps 150 divisions. (In 1918, after four years’ steady effort of expansion, it had reached no such figure.) Again, in the summer of 1941, our headlines presented day by day the amazing German advance across Western Russia as a steady series of murderous checks and reverses. Did this interpretation come from “news released by official sources”?

Since Pearl Harbor no less than before, the press and radio commentators have been free to discuss critically the news that does pass the censor, and to point out the real significance of what has occurred. About the middle of November, it was explained to the press (by the highest authority) that with modern aircraft it was possible to defend the Philippines; and that the Army had sent out strong forces of new planes for this express purpose. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor (on December 28), a press dispatch from Manila explained that most of these planes and practically all the airfields in Luzon had been destroyed by the surprise attacks with which the Japanese bombers opened the war. This happened in broad daylight, some hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and after reports of that event had duly given warning.

The effect of this prompt destruction of our air power was to wreck at the start the whole plan of strategic defense in Eastern waters. The Japanese were able to land strong forces (including tanks) quite unopposed at most points, and to carry through the occupation of the islands in methodical fashion. With the airfields wrecked, it was no longer possible to continue sending out reinforcements of American bombers by air; nor (after the Japanese landings) could reinforcements be sent to the American garrison.

Had our planes kept control of the air around Manila, no Japanese transport could even have approached that region. New bombers from the United States would have appeared on the scene; and the Philippines would have served as a strong bastion of defense on the eastern flank of the East Indies. The Japanese fleet would never have ventured toward the Macassar Straits, and the Allied naval and air forces then on the scene could have kept up lively and effective defensive operations. The shattering of our air power meant not only the loss of the Philippines, but the wrecking of the whole part we could have played in the defense of the East Indies.

The press dispatch of December 28 was not quashed by the censor, but went straight through to a conspicuous place in the New York Times. Even to a layman it explained clearly what had happened in the Philippines up to that date; and it revealed in advance, so to speak, the bewildering contrast between the headlines and the actual course of events during the next two months. Roughly speaking, not a single paper took note of it, or profited by it in the subsequent handling of current news from the Far East. No paper pointed out the obvious fact that the whole basis of our defense in the East had been wrecked by this initial bungle. No paper even alluded to the fact that the gallant defense of Bataan had thus been made a fruitless sacrifice.

Instead, the whole chorus of headlines and comment maintained for weeks on end the appealing fiction that the defenders on Bataan were carrying out the strategic mission previously assigned them. For long, it was even pretended that this resistance was diverting Japanese strength from Malaya; and when this fallacy collapsed, most of the press turned in resentment upon the War Department for leaving MacArthur in the lurch. “Where are the planes the troops are calling for at Bataan?” The answer had been obvious since December 28: the planes were lying, burned and bombed, on the wrecked Luzon airfields. Every correspondent in Washington knew the answer to the rhetorical questions the press was raising. All joined in the game of ignoring that answer, and of keeping from the public a secret already disclosed in print — but ignored and forgotten.

In this same spirit, the press and the radio joined in creating the illusion that strong American reinforcements were arriving on the scene day by day during the fighting in the Dutch East Indies. Comments between the lines made clear that the American ships and planes thus engaged were for the most part survivors from the general wreckage at Manila, and all Washington evidently shared this secret. A few correspondents, in a more responsible spirit, pointed out from time to time that the lack of convoys and shipping was the controlling factor in this problem. As late as six weeks after Pearl Harbor, a high official of the Administration explained that the re-establishing of our defenses in the Pacific had absorbed the reinforcements in bombers and anti-aircraft weapons — up to then, apparently, none had been sent to Java. This authoritative statement passed without notice or comment: the critical facts it disclosed were ignored in the daily interpretations of events from that time forward.

It is out of the question to assume that this buoyant tone of the press was imposed on the country by the censorship or any other official control of the news. The military and naval communiqués have not struck any such note, and by and large an outside reader has little fault to find with what they have said, or omitted to say, ever since December 7. The Secretary of War more than once t ried to tone down the more highly colored visions the press was indulging in, and his statements have always been in the direction of fact and common sense and moderation. Yet he made not the slightest headway.

Even after the final tragedy at Java, the press made little effort to discern, or to appraise fairly, the causes of the far-reaching defeat we had suffered. It turned, instead, to the absurd illusion of an immediate offensive from Australia. There was a brief period of ill-tempered (and misdirected) scolding of “the General Staff mentality” and the brass hats at Washington. Then, promptly, we were whisked off upon a new round of optimistic visions in regard to other theaters of the war. On Midsummer Day, with the capture of Tobruk, General Rommel brought us face to face with realities.

This long record of false perspectives and mistaken enthusiasms is the result of the press making itself the guide and support of public opinion, of taking over the responsibility for keeping up morale and providing always a hopeful and encouraging turn to the news that comes in.

“What kind of people do they think we are?” Churchill cried out in regard to the Japanese. To the press and the radio the American public may well address the same question.