Impartiality and Propaganda

If objectivity was an elusive ideal, what about impartiality? News values are affected by the demands of war and while the above set the parameters by which the press hoped to operate, the conflict distorted those values. War, generally, is good news for newspapers. What is being

reported has an increased significance, readers have a greater stake in what appears in print and, correspondingly, circulations rise:

Classic warfare is the epitome of a ‘good story’, high in tension and drama, with complex main plots and sub-plots played out within

traditional binary oppositions of aggressor and victim, winner and loser.

While expensive to cover, warfare is commercially rewarding for the media, since its threat and unfolding ignite insatiable audience appetite for news.¹⁹⁴

The effect of war on journalism, rather than the economics of journalism, is more complex and was articulated by Knightley. Journalists, he stated, face a dilemma if they wish to observe the military in action and record the first draft of history.¹⁹⁵ He added in a revised edition:

If doing that as objectively and as truthfully as possible means writing and broadcasting stories damaging to their nation’s war effort, what are correspondents to do? Does the journalist within the correspondent prevail? Or the patriot? And what if reporting patriotically involves telling lies? Is that journalism or propaganda?¹⁹⁶

This is a question that is fundamental to this thesis: was the imperative for journalists between 1939 and 1945 to support the war effort in a ‘deliberate and systematic attempt to shape opinions’ or to hold the authorities to account?¹⁹⁷ And if they did the latter would they be helping or hindering the

194 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, ‘Understanding the Second Casualty’, in Reporting War:

Journalism in Wartime, ed. by S. Allan and B. Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 25-42 (p. 26).

195 Knightley, First Casualty, p. xiii.

196 Knightley, First Casualty, cited in Goldstein, Journalism and Truth, p. 82

197 Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 5th edn (London:

Sage, 2012), p. 289.

fight against Hitler? With reference to the traditional theories of Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell and Edward Bernays, more recent studies have engaged with these questions. Leo Bogart, quoting a report from the former United States Information Agency, wrote: ‘It is more important to reach one journalist than 10 housewives or five doctors.’¹⁹⁸ Frank Webster stated that the media are needed for more than reporting acceptable news from the battlefield: ‘They are also central players in justifying war itself…

especially so in democratic regimes.’¹⁹⁹ Susan Carruthers concurred:

‘Consequently, to marshal and maintain morale on one’s own side, and attack the opponent’s, ‘munitions of the mind’ were an integral part of total war. Mass media received their call-up along with other vital wartime industries.’²⁰⁰ Ruling elites, she wrote, echoing Gramsci’s theory of

hegemony, had to generate support for the conflict and enlisted the media to help bolster the case. Patriotism was the trigger to assure compliance.

This was an important element in the reporting of the Second World War. Nationalism, Michael Howard wrote, is ‘indissolubly linked, both in theory and practice, with the idea of war’ and Fleet Street interprets this as an inclination to be patriotic.²⁰¹ In peacetime, this manifests itself most obviously in sports tournaments like the football World Cup and the Olympic Games, or even in such trivial entertainment events as the

198 W. Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free, 1922), Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (London: Kegan, 1927), E. L. Bernays,

Propaganda, (New York: Liveright, 1928), republished (New York: Ig, 2005); Leo Bogart, Cool Words, Cold War: A New Look at USIA’s Premises for Propaganda (University of Michigan: American University Press, 1995) pp. 55-56, cited by Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda, p. 296.

199 Frank Webster, ‘Information Warfare in an Age of Globalization’ in War and the Media, ed. by Thussu and Freedman, 57-69 (p. 65).

200 Susan L. Carruthers, The Media At War (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 55.

201 Michael Howard, ‘War and Nations’, in Nationalism, ed. by John Hutchinson and Athony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 254-7 (p. 254).

Eurovision Song Contest. ‘The patriotic imperative lies at the heart of British journalists’ culture,’ Richard Keeble wrote. ‘Not surprisingly this patriotic loyalty appears strongest during times of war.’²⁰² Simon Cottle argued: ‘National feelings of communal identity, pride, and patriotism, as well as historical parallels and past myths, are all summoned through the genre of war reporting and these generally seek to position “Us” in

opposition to “Them”.’²⁰³ With the nation, Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, under attack journalists were inclined to ignore municipal and central government deficiencies under these circumstances and, even if they were not, most of the information they received was slanted because it came from official sources.²⁰⁴ Piers Robinson noted that research has ‘consistently demonstrated that the media have tended to remain deferential to

government positions during times of crisis and war’ and Oliver Boyd-Barrett added that the media typically cover wars from the point of view of the country in which they and their major owners are based.²⁰⁵ This applied to photographs as well as print, as Barbie Zelizer noted: ‘War is presented as often heroic and reflective of broader aims associated with nationhood, clean and at times antiseptic, and involving sacrifice for the greater good.’²⁰⁶ Consequently, photographs of dead British soldiers are never published except in the context of their being honoured, and the concurring images are

202 Richard Keeble, Ethics for Journalists, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 98.

203 Simon Cottle, Mediatized Conflict (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), p. 77.

204 Anderson described the nation as an imagined concept in the sense that ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 3rd edn [London: Verso, 2006] p. 6).

205 Piers Robinson, ‘Researching US Media: State Relations and Twenty-First Century Wars’, in Reporting War, ed. by Allan and Zelizer, 96-112 (p.108); Boyd-Barrett,

‘Understanding’, p. 29.

206 Barbie Zelizer. ‘When War is Reduced to a Photograph’, in Reporting War, ed. by Allan and Zelizer, 115-135 (p. 116).

of happy, smiling troops either going off to battle or caught in a moment of triumph.

If the patriotic imperative was not enough to distort normal news values during wars, there were other dominant values. Newspapers have a discourse with their audience, and Stuart Hall’s communication model of encoding and decoding is affected when the decoders (the audience) are people who were either giving or risking their lives for the war, or had relatives who were.²⁰⁷ Even in a modern context this places restrictions on reporting. Certain sections of the press had reservations about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but not even the most war wary ever manifested their doubts with criticism of the troops. ‘Our boys’ are close to sacrosanct, and Keeble acknowledged this: ‘Journalists tend to be more courageous in criticising the government when British forces are not engaged; when “our boys” (and a few of “our girls”) are in action, most of the media tend to back it.’²⁰⁸ Given that the Second World War had the civilian population on the front line in large numbers for the first time in modern warfare, ‘our boys and girls’

extended beyond the armed forces and into the roads and avenues of Britain.

The exemption from press criticism, the inclination to make references to the heroic whole, followed naturally. This was particularly relevant for the newspapers in the study whose audience was almost entirely locally based.

As Jeremy Iggers noted: ‘Reporters must cultivate sources and are keenly

207 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Media Studies: A Reader, 2nd edn, ed. by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 51-61.

208 Keeble, Ethics, p. 97.

aware that their future access to information depends on how they handle today’s story.’²⁰⁹

His observation underlined a second dominant force: access to information. Newspaper discourse has tended to be shaped by ‘the elements of society that are powerful enough and organized enough to generate press materials, hold press conferences and otherwise garner media attention’.²¹⁰ Herman and Chomsky, McNair, Cottle and others have stated that this elite-dominated, top-down model of communication means that reporters are usually reliant on the powerful for their information, particularly in war conditions. Cottle wrote:

The media’s dependency on military access, military transport systems, military minders, military briefings, military communication systems and military protection in the military-controlled theatre of war all powerfully contribute to the military’s ability to manage and contain the flow and content of journalism reporting.²¹¹

In reality, Daya Thussu and Des Freedman argued, this meant that although the journalists cherish the idea that they are impartial observers of the armed forces, they are frequently unable to ‘shrug off ideological and

organisational restrictions to keep a watchful eye on activities of military combatants’.²¹²

This complies with Herman and Chomsky’s argument that

journalism reproduces the views and values of the elite due to a propaganda model by which money and power are able to filter the news to marginalise dissent and ‘allow the government and dominant private interests to get

209 Jeremy Iggers, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest (Oxford: Westview, 1999), p. 40.

210 Ibid, p. 103.

211 Cottle, Mediatized Conflict, p. 84.

212 War and the Media, ed. by Thussu and Freedman, p. 5.

their messages to the public’.²¹³ One of these filters that leads to this manufactured consent stems from practical necessity. Newspapers cannot afford to have reporters everywhere and therefore concentrate on places where they know news stories often happen, the lobby in Parliament being an obvious example, press conferences organised by large organisations another. This leads to the elites – the government, business and ‘experts’

provided by the agents of power – having ready access to the media and excludes marginalised voices. McNair, building on Herman and Chomsky, stated that these filters help construct a propaganda model in which the media’s perceived ability to ‘manage and manipulate public opinion will be used by elites in the pursuit of what they define as the “national interest”.’²¹⁴ Given that it was the elites who had most to lose if Germany won the war, the national interest, in their terms, was to continue the fight.

Cottle argued that the propaganda model is more complex than that implies, because codes of conduct and professional norms can lead to interactions between journalists and the sources of power that are not always beneficial to the latter.²¹⁵ One part of this elite was largely exempt from this, however, namely the newspaper proprietors, and the influence they wielded on the pages of their newspapers was best summed up by Beaverbrook who told the Royal Commission on the Press in 1948:

I ran the paper [the Daily Express] for propaganda, and with no other purpose… The policy is that there shall be no propaganda in the news.

There is a strong, stern rule, and the most tremendous attempt…to carry the rule into effect. But we do stumble. It is terrible how we stumble; it is heart-breaking at times. ²¹⁶

213 Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 1.

214 McNair, News and Journalism, p. 68.

215 Cottle, Mediatized Conflict, p. 18.

216 Royal Commission (Documentary Evidence: Question Session on 18 March 1948), pp.

154-5.

Beaverbrook ‘stumbled’ regularly, most frequently over the issue of the British Empire. When asked by the Commission what would happen if editors had ever taken an alternative stance, he replied: ‘I talked them out of it.’²¹⁷ Beaverbrook’s maxim was simple: what was the point of owning a newspaper if you could not influence what appeared in it?²¹⁸ Greenslade summed up his attitude as: ‘I am the boss; I have the power; I know best;

you editors are the transient holders of office.’²¹⁹ A Beaverbrook employee was quoted by Curran and Seaton as saying: ‘Fleet Street… was strewn with the corpses of Express editors.’²²⁰ As Harcup argued, journalists are torn between a ‘professional commitment to ethics and truth telling’, yet at the same time are ‘expendable employees expected to produce stories to sell in the marketplace’.²²¹

3.4 Balance

McNair stated that journalism presents a narrative about the world beyond the experience of the reader: ‘This narrative is asserted to be “true”.

The stories told to us by journalists are factual, rather than fictional.’²²² He also argued that that one of the journalist’s tasks is to keep voters informed

‘about the things they need to know’ and to do that balance is required.²²³ Yet, in the circumstances listed in the previous section, that key component of Scott’s definition of news values, was impossible. Journalists based in

217 Ibid.

218 Greenslade, Press Gang, pp. 7-11.

219 Ibid, p. 63.

220 Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 41.

221 Tony Harcup, Journalism: Principles and Practice, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2009), p.

217.

222 McNair, News and Journalism, p. 23 .

223 Ibid.

Germany would have had their reports heavily censored, and their loyalties or motives questioned, as indeed Sir Nevile Henderson’s were when he served as British ambassador to Berlin between 1937 and 1939 and the press referred to him as ‘our Nazi Ambassador in Berlin’.²²⁴ Another deterrent was perception. If reporters for British newspapers had not been arrested for being the enemy by the Gestapo, they would have risked being seen as mouthpieces for Hitler and the Nazis and there would have been the threat of being regarded as traitors. William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, whose crime was to broadcast radio propaganda to Britain from Berlin from 1939 to 1945, was hanged for treason in 1946, ironically, as Martin Doherty pointed out, in an act of political propaganda.²²⁵ Keeble suggested that: ‘Journalists reporting from Berlin would have been unthinkable during World War Two.

Yet during the undeclared Falklands, Gulf and Kosovo wars, British journalists sent dispatches from “enemy” territory, though not without sparking some major controversies.’²²⁶

Consequently any form of balance was impossible between 1939 and 1945 but reporters, whose lives were put as much at risk by the German bombers as those of their readers, had little personal incentive to seek it and would have incurred the wrath of their editors if they tried. As Steinbeck noted: ‘The foolish reporter who broke the rules would not be printed’.²²⁷

224 Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), pp.

19-20.

225 Martin A. Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 184.

226 Keeble, Ethics, p. 102.

227 Steinbeck, Once, cited in Fussell, Wartime, p. 286.