The moral of the story seems clear - confiscate and destroy the film of all reporters in the area of military operations.
Fixed it for y'all......
Why is it that reporting on these wars is bad?
Do you not think that public support is important? Or is it better if public support is manufactured by means of propaganda, instead of just allowing the public to see whatever information comes out?
If people don't have the "stomach" or whatever you want to term it for continuing a war, the decision should be in their hands. I don't believe in making-war-by-bureaucracy without the input of the people, and I highly doubt that the founding fathers believed in it either.
So when the fed.gov in WWII tightly controlled media reporting on the war it was wrong and evil?
I would say that FDR was not the best thing for civil liberties ever, yes. I think WWII would have survived a free and open media because the facts
strongly weighed in for the War; that's probably why the "tightly controlled media" worked in the first place. If the "tightly controlled media" actually diverged much from what reporters and citizens would have reported anyway, it probably would've been an abysmal failure.
The only thing worse than an unpopular war is forced propaganda aimed at convincing people they should make it popular. So yes, in that sense I think the media restrictions were wrong. About the only scenario you could imagine it being right is if you thought that propaganda was the only way to prevent Hitler from winning the war.
Maybe you don't believe the people would've wanted to stop Hitler without the elites manufacturing propaganda to get them onboard, but I have more faith in democracy myself.
