Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/281



for war news and if none can be furnished substantially correct, description and comment are substituted, but this can not be called war news.79

What can the war correspondent do? He seems to face an impasse. Obstacles of every form prevent him from reporting genuine war news, and yet the demand for it exists. Little “ local color ” can be given since battles and sieges are much the same the world over. In the war of 1914, a prominent weekly

of New York City cut the Gordian knot and installed its war

correspondent in its city office with instructions to write the chronicle of the war, thereby but repeating an achievement attributed to the war correspondents of the seventeenth century

as described by Shirley : “ Yet they may be called great spirits too, for their valour is invisible : these , I say, will write you a battle in any part of Europe at an hour's warning, and yet never set foot out of a tavern ; describe you towns, fortifications, leaders, the strength

of the enemies, what confederates, every day's march, — not a soldier shall lose a hair, or have a bullet fly between his arms, but he shall have a page to wait on him

in quarto ; nothing

“ The degradation of the war correspondent is due to a cause which has affected all the other departments of a modern newspaper — the craze for

sensation. Archibald Forbes, Kinglake, and MacGahan wrote articles which could be re-published with very little alteration as serious history.

At present the demand is for sensationalism which is worthless for historical purposes. ” — Francis McCullagh, New York Evening Post, January 11, 1913.

The war correspondence of the Daily News as collected and published in 1871 forms a continuous narrative of the war between Prussia and France, as the war correspondence of the Daily News in 1877 gives a con tinuous narrative of the war between Russia and Turkey. 79 In the Spanish -American War the passenger steamer Paris left New

York and was daily reported by a sensational daily as having been seized ; the report was at once contradicted by the same paper, and then the con

tradiction denied. As the wireless telegraph was not then in operation, it

was practically impossible for any one to know what happened to the Paris between ports. The same daily maintained a bulletin -board on the top of a Broadway building. By means of a scaffolding a reporter constantly chalked bulletins concerning the war.

It often is impossible in such cases to separate cause and effect, de mand and supply.

Hamilton Holt says that “ to compare the history of the war as written in the headlines of certain American papers with the actual course of events

would be an amusing though profitless occupation .” — “ Understanding the War News,” Independent, January 31, 1916, 85 : 146.