Reporting World War II

G. Kurt Piehler

ISBN 10: 1531503098 / ISBN 13: 9781531503093

Published by Fordham University Press, 2023

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781531503093

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Reporting World War II
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1531503098
• ISBN 13: 9781531503093
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 526 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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 Thérèse 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 communiqués 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.

About the Authors

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 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).

Steven Casey is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and is the author of War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and When Soldiers Fall: How Americans Have Confronted Combat Losses, from World War I to Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Kendall Cosley is a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University. She studies the relationship between war correspondents and American soldiers in World War II.

Douglass K. Daniel has practiced journalism and studied and written about media and history. He was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press for nearly three decades. Daniel also taught journalism as an assistant professor at Kansas State University and Ohio University. He is the author of several books, including biographies of 60 Minutes correspondent Harry Reasoner, Oscar-winning writer and director Richard Brooks, and celebrated actress Anne Bancroft.