by the restrictions imposed on it by the government itself,[1] that it has disregarded his special fitness and preparation for the work and has preferred retired army officers to civilians as war correspondents,[2] that it has ignored his many services to the country,[3] and that it has contented itself with enumerating the various occasions when war correspondents have been taken to task for giving information to the enemy, although exonerated from the charge of wilfully so doing.
The war correspondent not only indignantly denies the justice of the criticisms of his work , but he points with pride to his achievements,67 to his subordination of himself to his news-
He will be a mere transmitter by strictly defined channels of carefully revised intelligence liable to be altered , falsified , cancelled , or detained at the discretion of the official set in authority over him . . . . The new order of things has taken war correspondence out of the category of the fine arts.”—"War Correspondence as a Fine Art," Memories and Studies of War and Peace, p. 216.
67 An excellent account is given of the “brilliantly descriptive message
from Metz” narrating the surrender of Marshal Bazaine," a message
that was copied from the Daily News into nearly every other paper in
England,” in F . M . Thomas, Fifty Years of Fleet Street, pp. 176–177.
G. W. Smalley says that it was supposed in London to be the work of A. Forbes, but that the real author was in reality G . Müller, a correspondent of the New York Tribune who wrote his account in the London off
- ↑ M. Macdonagh gives an historic summary of the press regulations issued by different war departments in “Can We Rely on War News?", Fortnightly Review, April, 1898, 69: 612–625.
Lord Wolseley gives a complete statement of those in force during his command in The Soldier's Pocket-Book for Field Service.
G. Mason gives a summary of the restrictions in force at the opening of the war in 1914.—"American War Correspondents at the Front," Bookman, September, 1914, 40: 63–67.
Archibald Forbes, at white heat over the “degrading and intolerable" restrictions “that had been placed on war correspondents, especially the one authorizing the military censor to compel all communications to go through him,—should he deem the intelligence to be dangerous to the good of the army, he may stop it or alter it. In the case of telegrams the military censor will generally exercise this power,—” gave a scathing denunciation of the rules announced. “It is in his power," he writes, “if the correspondent perversely declines to lie, nevertheless to make a liar of him! Why not prescribe the torture till he lie at first hand? Why descend to the nefarious baseness of authorized forgery?—for virtual forgery it is thus to alter, to warp, to overturn."—" War Correspondents and the Authorities," Nineteenth Century, January, 1880, 7: 185–196.
- ↑ This suggestion has often been made, although the best correspondents have been civilians. M. Macdonagh, Note 64, supra.
- ↑ P. Landon suggests that a long list could be made of these services. “War Correspondents and the Censorship,” Nineteenth Century and After, August, 1902, 52: 327–337.
