WAR COVERAGE EVOLUTION

War coverage has always been a dangerous task. War correspondents have risked their lives with a common aim: providing the best information to their audience. Media coverage has evolved as well as technology. Technological developments are strictly related with the way that information has been transmitted in different wars. 

The civil war coverage created a big demand, newspapers such as the New York Herald spent 1$million. About 500 correspondents were covering the North and 100 were in the South. Censorship has characterized several conflicts, in this period were created the “press pass” and the “press release”. The technology used by journalists was mainly the telegraph and also photography. But pictures had to be sent and arrived late to their destination. 

In the World War I there was laws which restricted the press: The Espionage Act (journalists can’t publish useful information for the enemy) and the Sedition Act (disloyal language about the US Government is banned). The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was the first US propaganda office and also limited press freedom. Technology had evolve from the Civil War: film cameras, motion-picture, telegraph and wireless telegraph and trans-Atlantic cable from England... But censorship controlled everything. 

The Espionage Act and Trading with the Enemy Act from World War I were still effective in the World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Censorship. Journalists were given some instructions through the “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press”.

During the Korean War, there was a self-censorship policy for the press, they could write but could be punished. Broadcasting began to evolve but radio was still the first source for the audience. It was the last US conflict of printed press and radio dominance. 

Like there was no declaration of war and then, no legal basis for the Vietnam War, journalists were asked to practice a voluntary censorship. Media were controlled by the Wartime Information Security Program (1971). The Vietnam War was also called “the living room war” because of the evolution of broadcasting. Satellites were still in their infancy.

The Gulf War was characterized by the military control of the press access by using the Pool System (a group of journalists cover an event for the rest). Ted Turner created in 1980 the CNN, which emitted 24 hours a day the Persian Gulf War. The information arrived everywhere and rapidly through satellites video transmission. 

Correspondents were forced to leave Kosovo when the war started by the government and NATO forces were a questionable source of information. As far as technology is concerned: satellite cell phone allowed an express sent, satellite uplinks sent videos directly to newsrooms and digital video and cameras as well as the Internet made possible the transmission of images, videos and information rapidly. Media were very powerful and it worried the government, as Philip J. Crowley (US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs) said: “You have to plan your media strategy
with as much attention as you plan your military strategy”.