Witness to War -- Episode Two

"War not only creates a supply of news, but a demand for it"

- Anonymous editor

EPISODE TWO: 

The Golden Age

Prelude to World War I

    

            The telegraph and the increase of literacy during the period between the American Civil War and World War I launched "The Golden Age" of the press baron and war reporting.

            Newspaper reading was spurred by the massive population growth in the US and compulsory education in the UK.

            The number of British newspapers quickly doubled after the Education Acts of the 1870's, and existing papers saw their circulation shoot up.

            Editors in both countries noticed that reports of battles brought increased circulation, so they covered the Franco-Prussian War, the Sudan, Turkey, Khartoum, Serbia and China. 

            When there wasn't a war to report, they weren't averse to helping start one.

            When the American battleship Maine blew up in Havana's harbor, Spain insisted that it was an accident.  But publisher William Randolph Hearst saw an opportunity, and under a banner headline of "Remember the Maine," he whipped the American public into a frenzy.

            Richard Harding Davis, Hearst's star reporter, was sent off to Cuba and quickly became the quintessential war correspondent.

            Davis would make his name covering the Spanish American War with breathtaking accounts of Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain.  But when he first arrived, nothing was happening.  Hearst told him to file stories anyway.  Davis wrote vivid accounts about landings of troops, bombardments and fleet battles -- all totally false.  Not to be outdone, other papers rewrote the Davis accounts.

            While Hearst and his newspaper reporters got their war, a new medium was emerging -- film.

            Theodore Roosevelt recognized the publicity value of this new medium.  In 1898, the Vitagraph company's cameraman filmed the now famous Roosevelt charge up San Juan Hill.   Actually, it was staged on a nearby bump on the landscape, Kettle Hill.   Roosevelt cooperated by striking photogenic poses as the camera crew filmed the "charge.''   However, the footage didn't come close to the excitement of the written accounts.  So producers decided to add some footage of a naval battle that they staged in a bathtub, complete with miniature cardboard ships. 

            Meanwhile, the British were actively filming their own versions of wars using similar techniques.

            In 1898, a producer used a suburban London back yard to film an attack on a British mission in China, and a golf course became a Boer War battleground in South Africa.

            Fakery paid.  The public's appetite for war was insatiable.

            The tragedy of the Golden Age was that few questioned the methods or the deceit.  But the military, stung by the occasional derisive report, began to censor the reporters' stories.

            Censorship went unchallenged, and the lack of serious, hard reporting let pass unnoticed a critical reality that occurred in South Africa during the Boer War: trench warfare did not work.  The lesson remained a secret until the slaughter of millions in World War I.