Summary: Revolution in Reporting Affairs
The Crimean War and its Significance for the History of War Reporting
Thomas Rid
Nearly 150 years ago European and American newspapers reported about the Crimean War between Great Britain and its allies on the one hand, and Russia on the other, leading to a mésalliance between the military and the press. War reporters entered the battlefield for the first time in 1855, playing a central role in influencing public opinion, particularly in Great Britain.
News management during wars, today casually referred to as CNN-effect, got underway during the Crimean War, when for the first time telegraphs and photographs were used to provide as realistic a picture of the battlefield as possible. William Howard Russell, war reporter for the London Times, often referred to as the initiator of this genre, reported via telegraph about the desolate and miserable condition of the British troops in Crimea, thus contributing to the first "war of the press”. Russell’s reports caused outrage in Great Britain and eventually forced the Aberdeen government to step down.
Public opinion started to change, when Roger Fenton, reported from the battlefield, using photography. Until this medium caught on, newspaper readers had depended on illustrations that were considered to extenuate the situation by excluding atrocities. Photography, on the other hand, was trusted to provide a realistic picture of what was going on.
Fenton produced about 360 pictures during the Crimean War, which, contrary to his own captions, presented an extenuated, idealized and idyllic picture of the war. Clearly Fenton worked on behalf of the government which now could show that the grievances Russell had pointed out, had been removed. 312 of Fenton’s photographs were displayed in an exhibition in London and other cities in 1855 and obviously met with more credibility than Russell’s written reports.
Though during the time of the Crimean War, the political impact of written reports still carried more weight, the influential power of visual reporting had entered the scene, reversing the relation between word and picture. The picture was no longer added to the text to illustrate it, but rather the text was added to the picture. The Revolution in Reporting Affairs introduced during the Crimean War represents a milestone in integrating medial information into modern military strategic thinking.
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