Wartime Censorship

Definition: Organized armed conflict among nations or states, or among factions within a state

Significance: Wartime situations have invariably led to increased censorship among belligerent factions

War and censorship are forms of state activity that have been closely connected for three reasons. First, the goal of censorship is to control what is thought and said. War encourages intense social controls in order to promote unity in facing an enemy. Second, after one side wins a war, censorship is one of the ways in which the victor can establish supremacy by forcing its own ideas on the loser and by suppressing dissent within the defeated population. Third, states at war have used censorship to keep secrets about strategy and weaponry from being made available to their enemies.

Antiquity to the Modern Era

The ancient Greeks are often thought of as the first advocates of freedom of speech and opinion. The warlike Greeks of Sparta, however, banned all philosophical and speculative writing, and they allowed no study beyond functional literacy within their city-state. As a people perpetually in a situation of war readiness, the Spartans did not tolerate any questioning that might produce any degree of nonconformity.

During the Peloponnesian Wars of the fifth century BCE, the enemies of the Spartans, the Athenians, also censored the expression of opinions. Athens, considered the intellectual center of classical Greece, during war used exile, imprisonment, or execution to silence many of its leading artists and thinkers, including Euripides, Aeschylus, Phidias, Socrates, and Aristotle.

The word “censor” comes from another ancient people, the Romans, who created a vast empire through their proficiency at war. Under the Roman Republic, the censor kept track of the number of males of military age. He also oversaw the punishment of treason, as well as with the punishment of immorality, which was seen as related to treason, since it involved undermining Roman national virtues. With the fall of the Roman Republic, the emperors assumed the powers of censorship, and suppression of treason and sedition was even more heavily emphasized. When Christianity became widespread, the refusal of Christians to participate in the army and their refusal to participate in religious ceremonies that expressed allegiance to the emperor were causes for the censorship and persecution of the new faith.

The Middle Ages saw the Crusades, warfare between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, and attempts to suppress Muslim intellectual influences in Europe. In the thirteenth century, ideas associated with the Arabic philosopher Averroës and with the Persian philosopher Avicenna were condemned.

With the rise of the modern state and the development of printing, governments became much more involved in censorship (which previously had been more the province of the Church), particularly during times of war. In England, for example, printing began in 1476 and the Tudor royal family, which came to power in 1485, became the first English sovereigns to maintain strict control over the press. The monarchs Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I, Tudor rulers of England, all acted decisively on their belief that government control of printing was necessary for state security.

During the English Civil War, in the mid-1600s, struggles for control of the state often took the form of struggles for control of information. After the king was executed in 1649, the English Parliament enacted a Printing Act limiting printing and requiring the licensing of all books and pamphlets. The goal was to silence the supporters of the king. When Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England in 1653, he ordered the suppression and prosecution of all unlicensed printers and all unlicensed news publications.

Despite the gradual growth of the principle of freedom of the press in England over the course of the century following the English Civil War, individuals continued to be prosecuted for publishing writings considered to be seditious. During the time of the Napoleonic Wars, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when England was at war with France, English intellectuals who had been sympathetic to the French Revolution were suppressed and many were imprisoned.

Early American Censorship

The American government’s first legislative act of censorship, the Sedition Act of 1798, was passed when the government was facing the possibility of war with France. The Sedition Act provided a maximum penalty of a two-thousand-dollar fine and a two-year jail term for any person who published anything against the U.S. government. The Sedition Act provoked strong opposition, and this opposition helped win the presidency for Thomas Jefferson. Censorship in American life did not disappear, however, and it kept reappearing in times of war or fear of war. During the War of 1812, after Andrew Jackson’s troops defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January, 1815, Jackson imprisoned a Louisiana newspaper writer who refused to accept Jackson’s censorship of war-related news.

During the Civil War, censorship was used to control public opinion regarding the war and to protect military secrets. The federal War Department at this time censored telegraph lines, and the postmaster general refused to allow the use of the mail to newspapers seen as disloyal to the Union cause. In March 1862, Secretary of War E. M. Stanton had soldiers seize the offices of a Washington paper, The Sunday Chronicle, that had been publishing information on troop movements. In Missouri, a state that contained large numbers of Southern sympathizers, in 1862 the U.S. army arrested and tried a newspaper editor for publishing articles that supported the Confederacy. In 1863 the Union Army seized the offices of the Chicago Times for publishing opinions seen as disloyal. In 1864 the New York World was shut down on the order of President Abraham Lincoln himself and members of its editorial staff were arrested.

The World Wars

Censorship in World War I was some of the most severe in American history. Many citizens did not understand the reasons for entering the war, or the goals of the United States in the war, and many citizens opposed American participation in the European conflict. The American government was therefore deeply interested in shaping public opinion and in eliminating opposition. In 1917 the U.S. Congress passed the Espionage Act, providing harsh punishment for anyone who spoke out against the U.S. government or military, and Congress strengthened this act a year later. The Espionage Act also empowered the postmaster general to deny use of the mail system to any writing or publication judged to be in violation of the act. This gave the power of censorship over all publications that moved through the mail to the postmaster general. Under the Espionage Act, Eugene V. Debs, founder of the Social Democratic Party and five-time presidential candidate, had his American citizenship revoked and was sentenced to ten years in prison for criticizing the war.

Congress also passed the Trading with the Enemy Act, which contained clauses that were intended to censor messages between the United States and foreign countries. This act authorized the establishment of a Censorship Board. The board contained representatives of the State Department, the War Department, the Navy, the Post Office, and the War Trade Board. It also contained George Creel, the chief of the Committee on Public Information. The Committee on Public Information was the primary source of war propaganda, so Creel’s inclusion on the Censorship Board emphasizes the fact that the board was set up to attempt to shape public opinion and not simply to protect military secrets from disclosure to the enemy. Creel’s committee told newspapers and magazines what kinds of material should not be printed, approved articles that were submitted to it, and it had the power to recommend that the postmaster general bar publications from the mail under the authority of the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act continued to be used as a basis for censorship after the end of the war. The act was not repealed until 1921, and it was used, during the antiradical hysteria that followed the war, to suppress unpopular views. In 1919, under the Espionage Act, U.S. attorney general Mitchell Palmer raided the offices of the Seattle Union Record and closed the paper. Other newspapers were still being barred from the mails well after the Armistice. Militarization and enforced conformity have thus tended to turn the homeland of the victors into something resembling conquered territory.

Censorship in World War II was less severe than in World War I, perhaps because the war had such wide popular support that little control of public opinion was needed. Still, immediately after World War II began, the U.S. Congress established the Office of Censorship, headed by Director of Censorship Byron Price. The director had authority to censor all communications passing between the United States and other countries. J. Harold Ryan, assistant director of censorship, was named to oversee the censorship of radio broadcasts. John H. Sorrells, the executive editor of the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, became another assistant director, charged with overseeing the press. In order to carry out the business of censorship, the Censorship Operating Board, consisting of sixteen government departments and agencies, was organized in January 1942. The Espionage Act was revived to prohibit the mailing of subversive materials.

Government and press worked closely together in monitoring the flow of information and shaping public opinion. Life magazine, in April 1942, published the article “Voices of Defeat,” which denounced individuals, organizations, and publications that expressed seditious views. Much of the information in this article had been given to Life by the Post Office, a source that the magazine did not acknowledge to its readers.

The African American press received particular attention from the American government during the war. The Post Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), operating under the Espionage Act, followed black newspapers closely, since criticism of racial discrimination during the war was seen as undermining war unity. After a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called a meeting of black editors in January 1943. White urged the editors to tone down their social criticism in order to avoid prosecution by the U.S. government. Although J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, prepared lists of black papers that his organization considered were publishing unacceptable material, Attorney General Francis Biddle’s support for freedom of speech prevented widespread attempts to suppress black publications.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War proved to be something of a turning point in American government-press relations. The news media had grown more sophisticated since World War II, and television had emerged. Television had the power to bring the horrors of war into every living room in America. American military and political leaders attempted to present the Vietnam War in a positive light, arguing that the war was being brought to a successful end and that U.S. forces, rather than being another in a long series of unwelcome foreign powers in Vietnam, were fighting on behalf of the beleaguered South Vietnamese military. A relatively uncensored news media made both of these positions difficult to maintain.

At the beginning of 1968, Vietnamese guerrillas known as the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army launched a major offensive in South Vietnam. Although the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops were driven back, the televised images of fierce fighting helped to convince many in the American public that the end of the war was not near, which, as it turned out, was the case. Television cameras and print reporters also continued to report on the enormous suffering the fighting was bringing to the Vietnamese people, in spite of military efforts to control the flow of news. For example, when more than three hundred civilian Vietnamese men, women, and children were murdered by American soldiers at My Lai in March, 1968, military officials deliberately withheld information from the press and attempted to minimize the atrocities. The news of the My Lai massacre became public, however, and many of the facts did emerge.

The ineffectiveness of the government’s control over the press became even more clear with the attempt to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers. These papers consisted of secret documents on the history of American involvement in Vietnam, which had been compiled by order of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. These papers provided evidence that the U.S. government had systematically misled and deceived the American public during the course of the war. They were leaked to the newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department employee. The government sued to block publication of the papers under the Espionage Act, but the Supreme Court eventually found in favor of the The New York Times and other papers involved in publishing the secret documents. The papers were published in book form and the government’s attempt at censorship attracted attention to them.

After Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, information about the war, and particularly televised images of fighting and death, helped to provoke widespread opposition within the American public to the conflict. This made the American political leadership sensitive to the need to obtain positive coverage for any military involvement. The experience of Vietnam also stimulated American leaders, military and civilian, to develop sophisticated ways of manipulating reporting on war.

In 1983, when the United States invaded the island of Grenada, President Ronald Reagan used a photograph of a commercial airfield being built with Canadian funding to justify the claim he made on television network news that Cuba was building military facilities on Grenada. During the invasion, a news blackout was imposed, ostensibly for strategic reasons. By a combination of misinformation and blanket censorship, the U.S. leadership was able to obtain almost universal popular support for the venture.

The barring of reporters from the invasion of Grenada proved to be an effective means of controlling public opinion, but it resulted in dissatisfaction and criticism from those in the media. As a result, the Pentagon created the National Media Pool of rotating news organizations. Under the pool system, the military would decide, in time of armed conflict, when reporters would have to become part of the pool and the military could set ground rules for reporting. In this way, the U.S. government could avoid having unpleasant war news published and avoid accusations of censorship.

When U.S. Marines and Rangers led the invasion of Panama at the close of 1989, no journalists were allowed to accompany them. Under the pool system, reporters were brought into Panama by the military four hours after fighting began and they were not allowed to file dispatches for another six hours. News personnel were guided by the military; Panamanian civilian casualties appear, as a result, to have been vastly underreported.

A combination of misinformation and tight media control proved highly effective in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The manipulation of the media was used not only to ensure popular support in the United States, but also to mislead the Iraqis. General Norman Schwarzkopf, after the successful campaign against Iraq, admitted that he had deliberately misled the media of his own country regarding where the major assault would take place, causing the Iraqis to concentrate their troops in the wrong places.

Reporters in the Persian Gulf depended heavily on American military public information officers for their access to news. Since news about high casualties and the sight of civilian suffering, in photographs and on television, had contributed to the popular disillusionment with fighting in Vietnam, the public information officers made an effort to represent the Persian Gulf conflict as a clean, high-tech war. The media were given low estimates of casualties among U.S. servicemen, and servicemen who had actually been killed or wounded in service were reported as “training casualties.” The public information officers also gave the television news networks tapes showing “smart bombs” zeroing in on specific, military targets to give the impression that all bombing was high-tech, with little death and destruction inflicted on Iraqi civilians. In fact, only about 7 percent of the bombs dropped were smart bombs and about 70 percent of all bombs dropped on Iraq missed their targets. A report critical of the effectiveness of smart bombs was not released until years after the war.

The Twenty-First Century

When the US military returned to the Middle East in the Afghan War (launched in 2001) and the Iraq War (launched in 2003), journalists returned too. In response to pressure from the media for greater access, the Department of Defense began a policy of "embedding" news reporters with military units, having them accompany troops on missions so they could report on military activity, as long as they did not disclose sensitive information like unit locations or battle plans. Thus, when the US-led invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, more than 700 journalists accompanied US forces, and there were hundreds more in the country not officially embedded. On a number of occasions, journalists who violated the Pentagon's rules about revealing operational details were expelled from the country; a notable instance of this was Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, who was sent back to Kuwait after describing US troop positions in a report. The practice of embedded journalism, which received a great deal of attention for its up-close reporting of soldiers' experiences, was however criticized by some as hampering journalistic independence and making reporters into inadvertent cheerleaders for the military.

A notable instance of censorship in the Afghan and Iraq wars that actually dated back to the Persian Gulf War was the government ban on publishing photographs of the flag-draped coffins of dead servicemembers being returned to the United States, as the images of dead and wounded in Vietnam had helped turn public opinion against that war. This ban was upheld as protecting the privacy of military families, but critics said it was intended to obscure the ultimate cost of war. In 2009, the administation of President Barack Obama overturned the ban, with the stipulation that the families of the dead had to grant permission to publish images of their loved-ones' coffins.

A major development of the twenty-first century was the advent of Internet technology, which allowed individual soldiers to create blogs of their experiences in conflict zones. These websites, known as "milblogs," or military blogs, were initially largely unregulated by the Department of Defense, aside from the blanket ban on disclosing details like troop strength, location, and plans. However, this ban, which fell under the umbrella of OPSEC, or operations security, could be interpreted broadly to shut down blogs that were generally critical in tone.

Bibliography

Bumiller, Elisabeth. "U.S. Lifts Photo Ban on Military Coffins." The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/world/americas/27iht-photos.1.20479953.html. Accessed 7 May 2018.

Curry, Richard O., editor. Freedom at Risk: Secrecy, Censorship, and Repression in the 1980s. Temple UP, 1988.

Dennis, Everette E. The Media at War: The Press and the Persian Gulf Conflict. Gannett Foundation, 1991.

Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920. U of Minnesota P, 1955.

Preston, Richard, and Sydney Wise. Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society. 5th ed. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1991.

Rall, Ted. "Censorship of War Casualties in the US." Al Jazeera, 28 July 2011, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117258316765540.html. Accessed 7 May 2018.

Strachan, Maxwell. "In Iraq, Military Bloggers Gave an Unprecedented View of War—Then Came the Clampdown." HuffPost, 23 Mar. 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/iraq-war-military-bloggers‗us‗5ab1543ee4b008c9e5f2089c. Accessed 7 May 2018.

Summers, Robert E. Wartime Censorship of Press and Radio. H. W. Wilson, 1942.

Ungar, Sanford. The Papers and the Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers. Dutton, 1972.

Washburn, Patrick S. A Question of Sedition. Oxford UP, 1986.