Soldiers Hate the Media—They Always Have

Ron Chernow’s thousand-page biography Grant explains the life and legacy of the General who won the Civil War, and the President who held the Union together after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disastrous Presidency of Andrew Johnson.  The book is also fascinating on tension between the military and the free press.

Like the vast majority of Presidents and soldiers before and after him, President Ulysses S. Grant hated the press.  He hated the press as a general and he hated the press as President.  That part of the book was no surprise. 

The interesting thing in Chernow’s book is his comparisons of the newspapers in the South and in the North. 

The Press in the Confederate states spawned across the South as soon as the war of rebellion began and became direct ancestor of Fox News.  The South was not a Democratic country. Like Fox News, the media in the South saw themselves as part of the war effort and wrote accordingly.  They were Совиет Правда (Soviet Pravda) , not the Washington Post.

Grant, like every other general in the North, got pummeled in the press, criticized, second-guessed and sometimes vilified.  In the Southern press, Generals were heroes. Battles were all massive victories, until they weren’t.

But also like Fox News, the press in the South wrote about real events and real people. Grant was an avid reader of Southern newspapers. At one point near the end of the war, Grant was out of direct contact with General William Sherman in his March across Georgia and turn north. Grant followed Sherman’s progress in Southern newspapers that were telling citizens where to defend against the Yankees.

When I first enlisted, I heard from older soldiers that hatred of the press really began during the Vietnam War.  Certainly, the Vietnam War turned up heat on an already simmering conflict, but the conflict itself is part of every army in every country with a free press.

The alternative to a free press is the propaganda machines in Russia and every other current and former tyrannical government.  The depth of the hatred of the press by the military was most clear to me when I was a public relations sergeant for my last unit.  I wrote what my commander wanted me to write, but because I had a camera and a notebook, I was “the press” to the majority of the soldiers in my unit.  In the school for military journalists at Fort Meade, there is no doubt we are public relations, not the press.

Among the many reasons to read Grant, is to see how deep the animosity is between the military and the free press. And to see that state-controlled media did exist in America in eleven states for four years.  

 

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