Overview
This set of essays offers new insights into the journalistic process and the pressures American front-line reporters experienced covering World War II. Transmitting stories through cable or couriers remained expensive and often required the cooperation of foreign governments and the American armed forces. Initially, reporters from a neutral America documented the early victories by Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Not all journalists strove for objectivity. During her time reporting from Ireland, Helen Kirkpatrick remained a fierce critic of that country's neutrality. Once the United States joined the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American journalists supported the struggle against the Axis powers, but this volume will show that reporters, even when members of the army sponsored newspaper, Stars and Stripes were not mere ciphers of the official line. African American reporters Roi Ottley and Ollie Stewart worked to bolster the morale of Black GIs and undermined the institutional racism endemic to the American war effort. Women front-line reporters are given their due in this volume examining the struggles to overcome gender bias by describing triumphs of Therese Mabel Bonney, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, and Anne Stringer. The line between public relations and journalism could be a fine one as reflected by the U.S. Marine Corps' creating its own network of Marine correspondents who reported on the Pacific island campaigns and had their work published by American media outlets. Despite the pressures of censorship, the best American reporters strove for accuracy in reporting the facts even when dependent on official communiques issued by the military. Many wartime reporters, even when covering major turning points, sought to embrace a reporting style that recorded the experiences of average soldiers. Often associated with Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, the embrace of the human-interest story served as one of the enduring legacies of the conflict. Despite the importance of American war reporting in shaping perceptions of the war on the home front as well as shaping the historical narrative of the conflict, this work underscores how there is more to learn. Readers will gain from this work a new appreciation of the contribution of American journalists in writing the first version of history of the global struggle against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy.
Full Product Details
Author: G. Kurt Piehler ,
Ingo Trauschweizer ,
Steven Casey ,
Kendall Cosley
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 9781531503109
ISBN 10: 1531503101
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 25 April 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
This book sheds light on those parts of the war American readers have largely forgotten: Irish neutrality, the Winter War in Finland, the role of the Black press, journalist-spies, and the ever-present pressures of censorship, to name a few. Journalism shaped our understanding of the war and, as Reporting World War II suggests, perhaps its outcome also.---Todd DePastino, author of Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front
Author Information
G. Kurt Piehler (Edited By) G. Kurt Piehler is the author of A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (2021) and several reference works related to war and society. He is a member of the editorial board of the Service Newspapers of World War II digital publication (Adam Mathews) and on the advisory board of the NEH-funded American Soldier Project at Virginia Tech University (americansoldierww2.org). Ingo Trauschweizer (Edited By) Ingo Trauschweizer is a professor of history at Ohio University. He is the author of The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and he is the editor or co-editor of three volumes in the Baker Series in Peace and Conflict Studies (Athens: Ohio University Press).
