Crosbie, The Golden Age Revisited, has some relevant insights:
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The willing obedience of the press to toe the line during the Second World War is frequently noted. Wyatt argues that ‘the reporters believed in the cause for which the nation was fighting’.12 Knightley explains, ‘war correspondents went along with the offi- cial scheme for reporting the war because they were convinced that it was in the national interest to do so. They saw no sharp line of demarcation between the role of the press in war-time and that of the government.’13 Hammond describes the press as cooperative, while Mander is even more emphatic: ‘This rhetoric of service to one’s country was never really questioned in World War II where it was as familiar as old wallpaper.’14 In a lavish catalogue for the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition on the Second World War’s war correspondence, Alan Fern argues that ‘the press was by no means a homogenous cheering section’, but tellingly he goes on to clarify, ‘this is another subject, to be dealt with in another context’.15
The attitude of obedience extended to acceptance of fairly stringent censorship guide- lines,16 so much so that one scholar notes, ‘they took it upon themselves to police their ranks’.17 In a study of the reporting of atrocity, Oliver stresses the particular self-censor- ing surrounding stories of American soldiers committing acts of violence or cruelty: ‘neither U.S. media outlets themselves nor their readers and listeners seemed particularly receptive to stories that disturbed, however faintly, the discursive nexus between war- making and national virtue’.18 This was true, too, of atrocities committed against American soldiers by enemy forces.19
Correspondents became so accustomed to censor- ship that Knightley quotes one at the end of the war asking where he would go now to clear his stories.20 Minor also stresses this habit of mind, attributing the timidity of American journalists in the face of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts ‘in large part to a hangover from the experience of its wartime relationship with government and men in power’. alike were sympathetic ... to regulations and mechanisms designed to limit and to a large extent channel the war’s news coverage’.22 Historians of propaganda have stressed the importance of war correspondents in col- laborating with the dissemination of the United States’ immense quantities of ‘white’ propaganda, in what has been called ‘the greatest propaganda battle in the history of warfare’.23
Another historian notes, ‘It was systematic mobilisation of propaganda and manipulation of public opinion. Although journalists soon realized this, few if any con- fronted the system.’24 And Charles Lynch, recalling his experiences as a Second World War correspondent, affirms this view:
It’s humiliating to look back at what we wrote during the war. It was crap – and I don’t exclude the Ernie Pyles or the Alan Moorheads. We were a propaganda arm of our governments. At the start the censors enforced that, but by the end we were our own censors. We were cheerleaders.25
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Such a complicated story! ... but briefly:
A thousand and one other organizational, technological, strategic, economic, cultural and political factors contributed but that’s the big picture: journalists in WWII couldn’t and wouldn’t criticize American soldiers, but during Vietnam they could legally and technologically do so and culturally and professionally felt obliged to challenge the government and the military with its lying public information officers in Saigon.