Could we have won WWII with the type of media we have today?

In WWII the allied media tended to report stories in a manner that aided our war effort. Today it seems that they are determined to undermine the war effort. I'm not saying that the facts are untrue, it's the way they are presented.
Case in point, an ABC News headline today on Afghanistan:

Taliban continue assault on Kandahar

An excerpt from the story:

The attacks are the most significant since the Taliban last week announced the start of its annual spring offensive and vowed to step up their fight after US commandos killed Osama bin Laden in neighbouring Pakistan.
As the biggest city in the south and the Taliban's birthplace, control of Kandahar is seen as key to US-led efforts to end the near 10-year Taliban insurgency and hand the Afghan government responsibility for national security by 2014.

...militiamen armed with suicide vests, guns and rocket-propelled grenades besieged targets...

They state that 18 people have been killed, then later tell you that 14 of the dead were insurgents, two Afghan security forces and two civilians. Two insurgents are left holed up in a building.

Some of my questions:

-Kandahar is the second most populous city in Afghanistan with nearly half a million people. They're beseiged by 16 insurgents? The two left alive and fighting are continuing to "beseige the city"? I'd say it's more likely that they themselves are beseiged.

-The vaunted Taliban Spring offensive consists of 16 guys? Is this a joke? The Afghan security forces kill all but two of them while losing two of their own, this is bad?

-If the city of Kandahar is so important to the Taliban but they only manage to attack with 16 guys, is that not saying something about the weakness of the Taliban? I'd say it would be more accurate to report it as favorable for the Afghan government.

I saw the same thing with the fight in Sangin, going in there were many stories on how we would fail, but you have to search hard to find news on how we succeeded beyond expectations. The same with most of the reporting from Iraq.

If we'd faced the same in WWII could we have won? Your thoughts please.

 

An interesting question. But has it not already been answered by Vietnam? Half hour nightly news effectively soured American opinion on that war. We now have 24 news with satallite coverage and the internent where anyone can be a reporter or a pundit. In 1968 only Walter Cronkite could convince America that it was a waste of effort and blood.

 

Very good point Belasar. Any opinion as to why they seem to want to hinder rather than help our efforts? Why not attempt to maintain strict neutrality in their reporting?

 

Actually, I would say in the opening days and weeks the mainstream press is a little gung ho if we look at the weeks just after 9-11 and opening weeks of Afganistan and Iraq. Over time it loses it 'sexyness' and they need to report something 'new'. Lesser voices from the Internet who do not need to justify their reporting over time take a more prominate role for they are the media that people who have an agenda seek out. Average people, once they have determined their lives will go pretty much the same as always, tune out until something reaches critical mass.

Take the report you cited, presented as a breathless sound bite, it seems imeadate and important, which is what our ADD society covets. Once you pull apart the facts and look at them indivdualy, they offer something different. Reading somethin in a newspaper simply does not have the same impact as visualy watching a video.

 

Most "journalists" today are not reporters of the facts...now they have their own agenda and fit the facts to their own agenda. In reality, they editorialize the news. In the past, there was a very distinct separation of editorial comments and news reports. Today, the editorials are "embedded" in the news stories while the editorials verge on pure propaganda, which Herr Doktor Gobbles would be proud of! (Flame suit on)

 

If we ever clean out Gitmo, perhaps we could detain the blowhards pundits of both right and left there? At least then I would not have to buy a new TV everytime I feel like thowing my shoes thru the screen!

 

You can call me out of date or any other number of names but I liked Walter Cronkite, I liked Ed Murrow, I liked Chet Huntley and David Brinkley but I very very much liked someone I never heard until later years when I read books, and that is the reporting and later books of Ernie Pyle. He lived with the troops, rode with the troops, and suffered like the troops did when following them about. My dad who traveled to some of the same places nearly at the same time verified his reports and accurate descriptions. He read his books several times when he wanted to remember the way things were. I will say that back in those days the news was considered a "service" provided by the media. Today it is not a service but depends on its ability to sell itself with whatever means it can to remain marketable as the least likable portion of media we consume each day. When it was a service there was a desire to present a "balanced" coverage and professionally you would not be considered acceptable if your stories were one sided or the other sided. However, today it is monetarily rewarding to present the extremes to raise controversy to make your stuff sell. Few of our remaining network news is presented without the "tabloid" influence to drum up their profits. There was a myriad of problems with the Viet Nam war that caused public support to falter, and many elements can be contributing but the bottom line is we were pretty far away from definable, achievable goals for our military and we constantly faced the problem of trying to destroy target X by only hitting in this zone, and target y could come in through zones we could not take on. It is not unlike us going into Pakistan with the difference that Pakistan has enemy in limited numbers where North Vietnam had a wealth of man power to replace those we were successfully destroying. In fact there is a great deal of the North with many countries where enemy could be rerouted if we had succeeded in many of the routes that were used. I would add that we had some home social problems that began to spill over into the problems of the military as well. I hope we do not reach a point of generating enemy faster than we can fight them in "anywhere" of the mid east. I do think the media as it is marketed today would be a hindrance to our war efforts in WWII. Our media today has become even a hindrance at informing the people and it gripes me who may be somewhat of a middle of the road type, to have to either hear it extremely one way or extremely the other. That is because the "middle" is boring and harder to sensationalize and sell. I am a "declined to state" politically not to be mistaken as an "Independent" or Tea Party. I view "politics" as one of those man made creations that has within the faults of all of us if we do not follow some enlightened leadership that can come from a good man "either" on the right or on the left. For example I respect the good and wise "Kings" or earlier times and what they accomplished on behalf of the people they led if their hearts were good. I do believe our Constitution is ours and "mankind's" best hope. It is a format that has the possibility of taking us past our individual faults.

I would hold up an example of great news coverage what Norman LLoyd did during the Viet Nam war. He retired from CBS, and purchased back much of the footage he himself shot while living amongst the troops. If you view his documentary he created from that footage that he put together and attended the re-unions of the 5th Battalion, 7th U.S. Calvary and they expressed their respect for how he has immortalized the contributions of this group to saving many lives of U.S. soldiers by finding the largest cache of weapons that would have found their way to be used against us had we not been successful at finding and destroying it. Many of these soldiers were appreciated in this story and this re-union was their first effort at even trying to remember the unpleasantries they experienced until this re-union happened combined with his documentary film. I was amazed and emotionally shaken by viewing the film, I showed it to an elderly neighbor that found some of the footage nauseating in its graphic depictions. However we were not sorry we watched it. I am sorry my writing is so wordy.

 

There are reporters like Pyle today too. You rarely hear about them because they work for small news agencies, papers or, publish free lance. They would never get hired in a large main-stream news orgainzation simply because of their views and politics.
The larger news outlets (New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, BBC, etc.,) are all somewhere between on the political Left and the far Left. Their news rooms are dominated and run by people with liberal to very Left leaning views. This in turn taints their reporting.
Another problem is that today's reporters think that it is somehow their duty to be 'detached' from the story. That is, they should be neutral and "fair" to both sides. What happens instead, is stuff like the above. They report what to them seems neutral but laden their stories with loaded terms like "beseiged."

I would think that the solution to this is something like Snopes and other groups that work towards media accuracy. A story like the above should be parsed for such inaccuracies and then scored out on the reporter, story for story. This would build a verifiable track record on a reporter and a news agency that would in turn show where they stand politically and accuracy wise on the news.

One thing you do see even today is that Left leaning news agencies are becoming more and more shunned by their potential audience. It galls the Left to no end that FOX out performs them on television for example. People are voting with their wallets and channel changers. Time and Newsweek are two more examples. Both magazines lean heavily to the Left and both are teetering on bankrupcy due to falling readership.

So, I think that in a major conflict like WW 2 today's media would find themselves more and more shunned by the public rather than influencing it. The days of three networks and a local paper are gone. News today has far too many means of delivery to not end up at a more balanced picture. Those who will not deliver balance are not going to thirve.

 

My post was not intended to dis Cronkite, but rather show the power his words had. When Walter said the war could not be won, middle America believed him and not their political leaders. It was not a bearded hippie in sandels but the calm, reasoned voice who nightly told them, 'that the way it was'.

Certainly others have swayed the public by their words and voice. From Thomas Paine's Common Sense to Edward R. Murrow's "This is Britain", the press has had an impact. The problem is that the press of today no longer see themselves as simply the reporter of facts but a indivisable part of events themselves. They know that by how they report current events they can manipulate those events in a direction they believe in. In my opinion Fox and MSNBC are reverse sides of the same coin.

If that was our only problem it would be bad enough, but the internet adds a wildcard that cannot be controled. Within our own forum we have see ideas laid out as facts that are nothing but pure fantasy, or delusion. Those who post these usually don't last long here, but there is no 'dishonorable discharge' to the internet as a whole.

 

Honestly, I think that maybe some of the younger, just-starting-out journalists might (stress: might) be able to report the news accurately and as un-biased as humanly possible. However, those are not the journalists that get printed or embedded. I also agree with the post-er who said that after the initial spazzing by the mainstream media (when all the talking heads start coming out and rehashing all the old news to keep the dead horse twitching for another week or two), people turn to the Internet, where anybody with a keyboard and tin-foil hat can put forth their spin on whatever topic they desire...which makes it easy for people to find a viewpoint that aligns with theirs, whether it contain all of the facts, a nugget of truth, or the merest smudge of common sense. So, in my opinion, I think that we (Allies) still would have won WW2. How popular the support for our troops/leaders would have been, how they would have been treated upon their return, and how enthusiastic the production lines that kept them supplied would have been...I think that the victory would have been a lot harder. Heh. Today's media would have had a frikkin field day with the Hurtgen Forest and Battle of the Bulge, and Patton would not have survived Italy (professionally).

 

But, the Electronics Revolution is changing this as we speak. No longer can one reporter dominate the news. The day of 'super star' anchors like Cronkite, Murrow, Huntley-Brinkley are gone. Witness how Dan Rather, one of the last of these, got his a$$ handed to him in less than 72 hours for reporting on George Bush's military service using two known forged letters. Twenty or thiry years earlier it would have taken months for this to be discovered and the election would have been over. The whole thing would be a minor note and Rather would have just made a correction and apologized with little harm to his career.
Today that is not the case. Serious mistakes and outright lies are discovered and published worldwide in a matter of days, if not hours.
Look at Obama's birth certificate from last week. There are already credible arguments that it too is a forgery. I personally don't really care at this point but, the point I am making here is that it didn't take 48 hours for people to come out with good arguments on both sides of the issue over what was presented.
The future of news is not going to be in the hands of a few super stars and a handful of news agencies that can manipulate it as they like. In today's world people have access to every side of an issue. In terms of WW 2 with today's news I would think that the Germans and Japanese man-on-the-street would know their war efforts were collapsing in ruins with the comensurate effects on public opinion and morale just as similar reporting would have on the Allies. The rise of the Internet and global communications is revolutionizing how we get information.

 

Don't apologize, I think it was a well thought out post and from the heart.

 

Just a question USMC, when you refer to "we" do you mean the USA? Or the Western allies (now NATO)
In the early years of WWII there was quite a raging debate in the UK about the conduct of the war, (The Norway debate) which had a full discussion in Parliament, and ultimately resulted in the downfall of Chamberlain's government.
There had also been debates (both paliamentary & public) about the various competing interests before the war.
(Should we suppore the Czechs, should we intervene on behalf of Poland etc)

I'm going to take a somewhat opposing view that the excessive cheerleeding and the indignant squelching of any difference of opinion before the Iraq war was a net negative, when it was said that any questioning of the war or how it was being managed was unpatriotic.

For the record, while I feel that Bush dropped the ball in Iraq after the invasion, I'm not opposed to using force or the choice to eliminate Saddam. What troubles me is the unilateral decisions taken to dismiss the army, appoint Bremer etc, which I felt should have had proper scrutiny.

Ideally the direction of foreign policy should not be taken by one man, but should be decided after healthy informed debate.

I don't want to get off on a political rant here, but it's the attitudes & general decline of patriotism in the general public that's the problem as much as it is the media.

 

Your comment that the Internet can find truth where it is buried has merit, but it also can lead us down rabbit holes with no exits. The photo's of a dead Bin Laden being a good example.

A better point was the effect such outlets might have on a Germany or Japan. The police appartus was to powerfull to allow a total collapse, but certainly it would have some effect on the determination of their troops to fight to the bitter end. There seem to be some corollation to the lack of will displayed by Iraqi regular army units in Gulf I and II. Good post over all.

 

The Western allies.

Theoretically, I agree with you, but I was comparing the media coverage to that in WWII. There was plenty of drum beating at the start of that war also (rightfully so I will add). There were also plenty of mismanaged battles and campaigns then too. Did the media concentrate on the naval defeat at Savo island or did they concentrate on the "heroic struggle" against the odds on Guadalcanal? Did they ignore the great naval victory at Midway or concentrate on the annihilation of Torpedo Squadron 8? I don't think the media in WWII was neutral, they were actually supportive of the war effort, to a large extent a propoganda arm of the government. Now the media ignores our successes and concentrates on and magnifies those of the opposition.

I agree that the ball was dropped but I'd lay the blame at the feet of Rumsfeld and many of the genarals advising the President. There was a very good article several years back that told how a number of less senior generals tried to get alternative perspectives before the President but were blocked by civilian DoD leadership and Pentagon brass. They eventually got a retired general to approach the President, back channel, and this eventually led to Bush meeting with Petraeus and a different course in the war. I think a free and unbiased press would have followed up and publicized the actual situation. As it was the right wing media argued "stay the course" and don't question the SecDef and Pentagon, and the left wing media wasn't interested in anything but "blame it on Bush". If they had reported the actual situation it would have been good for the public, the war effort and actually a much better story.
I had a son in Iraq during the surge, he was really angry when he got home and saw how it was being portrayed in the media. Most of the media was reporting how it was failing. He had seen first hand it wasn't. Marines in combat billets do 7 month tours, (support personnel at that time did a year). A number of the Marines that had served with him in Iraq volunteered to augment another unit and go back 7 months later. They said it was a harder tour because of the boredom, they never took one round of direct or indirect fire during the entire, 7 months, operating in the same exact areas that they'd operated in before. Areas where they had been constantly engaged. In the previous tour (unless they were on a major base like Al Asad) they had been forbidden to go anywhere without flack and kevlar, couldn't congregate in groups of more than three because of the IDF threat (indirect fire). Seven months later they were running organized PT, in PT gear through the streets of Ramadi, a town that 7 months earlier had been one of the most dangerous in the country. Yet the media continued to report how the war was lost and the surge was a failure. If interested I'll forward the article to you. Back on topic now

I don't see it. I continually see patriotism displayed by the American public at large, outside of some of the largest urban areas, the nations capitol and the media.

T.A.Gardner wrote:

Without a doubt the Germans and Japanese in WWII controlled what their populations learned and how it was interpreted. I tend to think if you fast forwarded them to today, their totalitarian regimes would still manage, to a great extent, control of what the population heard and how it was spun.

I agree chief. I don't think that the media in WWII was balanced though, I think they were actually supportive. Right now I'd settle for neutral or balanced, instead of adversarial.

 

I think it rather depends on which print media was being read. The Luce publications (New York) were rather anti-FDR, as were the Hearst (California) and McCormick (Chicago) publications, I'm not quite sure of the spelling of "Col." McCormick's surname. While those print publications didn't "dwell" on any of the American or allied failures, they also seem to have gone out of their way to squash any pro-FDR/administration slant in any article.

So I guess it sort of depended on which paper/magazines you read, and which radio stations you listened to. FDR was however the master of the radio, and they really were at a disadvantage in that arena. While the printed press was pretty much "free" to publish what they wished, the FCC still controlled the airwaves to a much higher degree than they do these days. Of course what the controlled then was mostly radio and wire, and without a license the stations were "off the air".

 

Good points

I'd agree with this, but it's the large urban areas that I was thinking about.

 

One must also remember that until after WW2 America was more than half located in the rural areas, something like 60/40 split if memory serves. I'll have to look it up, but most of the US was served by radio in the rural locals, with few newspapers outside of their local ones.

 

I do acknowledge that there are good and skillful reporters today but they rarely get to be featured for the kind of coverage that used to take place when news was a "service" and they are even edited sometimes before their information gets marketed. That perturbs me a lot. That is something most readers do not realize....the editor often cuts off portions of the story reported to make it fit the slot he chooses to present. Yes there is lots of competition in news that reduced the Newspaper's market but I will also add that this method of "editing" grew more and more and articles became very much less interesting for readers. When you can predict what will be said by a source, it is no longer interesting to me.