{"id":145606,"date":"2022-10-14T16:09:17","date_gmt":"2022-10-15T00:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145606"},"modified":"2022-10-14T14:13:58","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T22:13:58","slug":"nyrb-to-what-extent-did-newspapers-influence-public-opinion-in-the-us-and-britain-before-and-during-world-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145606","title":{"rendered":"NYRB: To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the New York Review of Books<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* In The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, Kathryn S. Olmsted claims that these monstrous moguls exercised a clear and malign influence on American and British policy, and that their desire not to \u201cconfront the fascist dictators made a war against fascism both more likely and more difficult to win,\u201d while Alexander G. Lovelace\u2019s theme in The Media Offensive is summed up in his subtitle, \u201cHow the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II.\u201d Both books are informative and stimulating; whether they succeed in making their respective cases is another matter.<\/p>\n

* The problem comes with Olmsted\u2019s claims about the power of the press. She has no difficulty showing what a ghastly crew Hearst, McCormick, and the Pattersons were, as well as Beaverbrook and Rothermere, but she fails to demonstrate that they wielded great influence, since the evidence is to the contrary. For years on end the American press barons ferociously savaged Roosevelt. And with what result? <\/p>\n

* In England the limits of the press lords\u2019 power had already been dramatically demonstrated by their one attempt to unseat a party leader. In 1930, while Stanley Baldwin led the Tories in opposition, \u201cBeethameer\u201d launched a concerted attack on him, even running parliamentary candidates. He saw them off in a single speech, and with a single phrase (provided by his cousin Rudyard Kipling), denouncing the press lords for seeking \u201cpower without responsibility\u2014the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.\u201d Whatever his other difficulties, Baldwin was never again troubled by \u201cLord Copper and Lord Zinc,\u201d as the two ogres of Fleet Street became in Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Scoop.<\/p>\n

What frustrated critics of the right-wing press are reluctant to concede is the extent to which popular papers become popular by reflecting opinion rather than directing it. From Northcliffe and Hearst on, the press lords have succeeded by tapping into sentiment\u2014often ugly enough\u2014that was already there. The Daily Mail beat the drum for the Boer War and then the Great War, but it didn\u2019t cause them. In Citizen Kane, a movie plainly inspired by Hearst, there is an episode supposedly taken from Hearst\u2019s life, when Kane sends a correspondent to Cuba to foment the 1898 Spanish-American War. The correspondent cables, \u201cCould send you prose poems about scenery\u2026there is no war in Cuba,\u201d to which Kane replies, \u201cYou provide the prose poems\u2014I\u2019ll provide the war.\u201d As it happens, those last words were exactly the sense that Tony Blair conveyed to John Scarlett, chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, twenty years ago. Scarlett duly provided the prose poems in the form of distorted or exaggerated intelligence, and Blair provided the Iraq War, or the British contribution to it. But again, although the London press allowed itself to be manipulated by Blair, and although Murdoch warmly supported that disastrous enterprise, he didn\u2019t start it.<\/p>\n

* Olmsted writes that \u201cBritish public opinion was, of course, partly shaped by one of Britain\u2019s best-selling newspapers, the Daily Express.\u201d But was it? She quotes Ernest Bevin, the great Labour politician: \u201cI object to the country being ruled from Fleet Street, however big the circulation, instead of from Parliament.\u201d That was at the time of the 1945 general election, when almost every important British newspaper apart from the Daily Mirror supported Churchill and the Tories and roasted Labour, as Wodehouse might have said, with Beaverbrook\u2019s Express doing so in poisonous fashion. After Churchill\u2019s outrageous radio broadcast warning that a Labour government might mean \u201csome sort of Gestapo,\u201d the front-page headline in the Express read \u201cGestapo in Britain If Labour Win.\u201d That evening Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, broadcast a masterly reply, in which he said, \u201cThe voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.\u201d Within weeks Labour had won one of the greatest landslide victories in British electoral history. It\u2019s hard to see much \u201cshaping\u201d there.<\/p>\n

* If, as Olmsted writes, \u201cthe conservative British and American media titans had achieved little in their efforts to influence domestic policies before 1937\u201d (or after 1937 either, she could have added)…<\/p>\n

* Murdoch may at one time have had a knack for backing winners, but he has not dictated the course of British politics any more than Fox News has stopped the Democrats winning the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the New York Review of Books: * In The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, Kathryn S. Olmsted claims that these monstrous moguls exercised a clear and malign influence on American and British policy, and that their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145606"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145612,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145606\/revisions\/145612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}