“Well, the press officer goes bananas. He wants to know which side the Globe thinks it’s on. So I tell him, it’s not on any side, stupid, it’s an objective fact-gathering organization. And he says, yes, but is it objective-for or objective-against?”
-From Night and Day

In Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play, Night and Day, about correspondents covering an African war, the reporter telling a photographer about his interview with a rebel leader—who wants to know if his paper is “objective-for or objective-against”—was not terribly different from the attitudes of government and military censors in real conflicts since the Crimean War up through both world wars and right through to today.

Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that covers the United States military, reported on August 28th that commanders in Afghanistan had compiled secret profiles of reporters. The Washington Post carried a similar story.

Although U.S. forces-Afghanistan officials denied it, Stars and Stripes stated, “The profiles contain ratings and pie charts purporting to depict whether an individual reporter’s work is ‘positive,’ ‘negative’ or ‘neutral,’ as well as advice on how best to place a reporter with a military unit to ensure positive coverage and ‘neutralize’ negative stories.” Stars and Stripes said the reports and the color-coded ratings on the journalists were compiled under a $1.5 million contract with The Rendon Group, “a controversial Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm that helped the Bush administration makes its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”

The Pentagon said the profiles did not violate any internal rules, although it planned to look into the practice. It denied using the profiles to garner positive coverage of the forces, but rather that they were meant to gauge the “accuracy” of reporters. Stars and Stripes disagreed: “None of the actual profiles reviewed… address questions of accuracy.” The paper said in an August 24th story that one of its own reporters—who usually have close ties to the U.S. forces after decades of covering America’s various conflicts as well as everyday military life—was denied permission to embed with a unit of the army’s 1st Cavalry Division “because the reporter ‘refused to highlight’ good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.” The military denied it, according to the article, which quoted an air force public affairs officer: “We have not denied access to anyone because of what may or may not come out of their biography…. It’s so we know with whom we’re working.”

Some think it is bad practice, such as Ron Martz, president of the Military Reporters and Editors Association, who said, “It speaks to this whole issue of trying to shape the message and that’s not something the military should be involved with.” Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, stated, “That’s the government doing things to put out the message they want to hear and that’s not the way journalism is meant to work in this country.”

Yet for journalists who cover the front lines, this is really nothing new.

William Howard Russell, considered by many as the father of war correspondents, endured what was probably the first example of military censorship during the Crimean conflict from 1853 to 1856. The British commander in the Crimea, Lord Raglan, refused to speak with Russell and ordered his officers to do the same in response to critical reports the reporter filed with the Times of London. He was also forced out of the military camp and had to set up his own tent nearby. Raglan also urged the government to charge him with breach of security and aiding the enemy. Russell’s editor remained stalwart, telling him, “Continue as you have done, to tell the truth, and as much of it as you can, and leave such comment as may be dangerous to us, who are out of danger.”

Alan Moorehead attempted to cover the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Express in Britain from Gibraltar in 1937 and recalled, “The chief secretary… told me flatly when I called upon him that he would expel me from the Rock if I published anything which he considered subversive.”

In France in the early days of the Second World War, reporters could not go anywhere outside Allied headquarters without a “conducting officer” to police their actions, while stories went through rigid and sometimes nonsensical vetting. While covering the French army, the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby was told he could not divulge their location. The correspondent explained he would only say the report was from France. Still, he was rebuffed. “But everyone knows we are in France.” Refused again, Dimbleby shouted, “What shall I say then, that we’re on the front line in the middle of Switzerland?”

The 1944 Regulations For War Correspondents, which included a forward by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, informed journalists they were at the mercy of the military staff: “War correspondents must at once carry out any instructions issued to them by any personnel of the Allied Forces acting in the execution of their duty.” The rules stated they could not leave the unit to which they were attached and while they were “free to converse with the forces whenever they wish,” this interaction was “subject to the approval of the officer in charge of the forces in question.”

Generals cancelled the accreditation of reporters, including one wrongly accused of using a secret transmitter in Italy; another who was expelled from the French war theater for broadcasting a speech he had not been told was meant to be unpublicised; and yet another who made a report that General Omar Bradley claimed “had cost the lives of American soldiers by making a premature announcement,” although it was later deemed a military error. There was also one reporter, Chester Wilmot, who ran afoul of Australian commander Sir Thomas Blamey several times in a previous assignment, so when they met again Blamey yanked Wilmot’s war zone accreditation and sent him back to Australia.

Historian Stephen Ambrose explained in his 1994 book D-Day that American commentators were confused and their commentary fairly useless at the time of the Normandy invasion due to censorship by the U.S. Office of War Information: “Their attempts at military analysis ranged from misleading to silly.” Yet the public wanted to hear something about the invasion, so they “chattered away, with little to say except that it was on.” Philip Howard from the Times of London, writing in 2004, explained that on D-Day, “Communications were difficult, slow and subject to strict censorship. The military controlled the medium as well as the message…. Censors were provided on the assault craft and even on the beaches.”

In his 1928 book, Falsehood in Wartime, Arthur Ponsonby wrote that “a Government which has decided on embarking on the hazardous and terrible enterprise of war must at the outset present a one-sided case in justification of its action, and…. The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in war-time in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned.” Ponsonby went on to say that this results in a type of “national wink” in which individuals take up falsehoods “as a patriotic duty.”

While the case of reporter profiles is not on par with the censorship of previous wars, it appears that in Afghanistan there may still be some winking going on.

Brian Hannon is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Edinburgh.