The origination of the quote, “In war, truth is the first casualty,” may itself be a casualty of the truth.

Credit often goes to Hiram W. Johnson, a rabidly isolationist senator from California who joined the senate in 1917 and said, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” But “The Idler” magazine might have beaten him by 159 years. In 1758 it claimed “...among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” “The Idler,” however, could have borrowed it from ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus (5th century BC) or 6th century Chinese general Sun Tzu, who, in his principles for the conduct of war, emphasized: “All warfare is based on deception.”

Nevertheless, whoever said it first was right, and no conflict better reflected the distortion of truth than “The Great War”... later dubbed World War I after a second war that could never happen again did happen again 20 years later. This barbaric conflict, with its massive standing armies, trench warfare and mustard gas, devastated Europe between 1914-1918. More than 17 million died and 20 million more were wounded. making it among the bloodiest wars in history.

Newspapers and some magazines were practically the only news sources and did, on the whole, a poor job of informing the public.

We’ll begin with Great Britain, since the United States did not join the conflict until its final year. The British press was hampered by passage of The Defence of the Realm Act, enacted four days after hostilities commenced. It afforded British authorities sweeping powers to stifle criticism. “No person shall by word of mouth or in writing spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population,” one of the regulations read. This gave the government wide latitude in stopping a newspaper from printing anything that could be construed as undermining the morale of the British public.

It was not only the fear of running afoul of the law that made journalists willing to accept censorship and publish propaganda. Journalists saw themselves as citizens first, and the public rallied around the war effort. As a result, newspapers avoided criticizing their own military and governments but demonized the German enemy. “They published fabricated stories of German barbarism, which were accepted as fact,” according to Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. “Although Belgian and French citizens were executed as reprisals by the German army in the early months of the war, many unverifiable stories -- later dubbed ‘atrocity propaganda’ -- were wholly untrue.”

At the onset of the war, British War Minister Lord Kitchener banned journalists from the front. Nonetheless, two reporters -- the Daily Chronicle’s Philip Gibbs and the Daily Mail’s Basil Clarke -- defied the order, and, acting as “journalistic outlaws,” traveled to the scene of hostilities. Gibbs was arrested and dispatched back to England, warned that he would be shot if he tried it again. After documenting the destruction during the Battle of Ypres in Belgium, which had suffered from German bombardment, Clarke received similar admonitions.

There existed a gentlemen’s agreement. British blunders were not reported nor were German victories. Eventually the British government provided five “accredited reporters” access to the front lines, and over the following three years loosened restrictions enough for several more to go. But censorship continued to prevail, ensuring the British public knew little of how well or badly their government and military were acquitting themselves.

The bloodiest defeat in British history, at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Allied troop casualties numbering 600,000 went largely unreported. On the first day British newspapers claimed the British were victorious, a sentiment that American newspapers echoed. On subsequent days newspapers skipped over the high number of casualties, the German’s use of mustard gas, and soldiers’ shell shock. As Greenslade wrote:

After the war, reporters who toed the government line were rewarded. The Daily Mail’s William Beach Thomas, who later claimed he was “deeply ashamed” of what he had written, and Philip Gibbs, were knighted for their services to journalism, as was Hamilton Fyfe, of the Daily Mirror and Daily Herald, who regarded his knighthood as a “bribe” to remain quiet about all the corruption he had witnessed.

America Joins the War

In the early part of the 20th century the United States maintained an isolationist policy. When President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 his campaign’s slogan was “He kept us out of the war.” In the years prior to America joining the war (1914–1916) the nation’s newspapers channeled this neutrality, despite public anger at the sinking of the British ocean liner, the Lusitania, on May 7, 1915 at the hands of a German U-boat. Among the 1,119 who died were 114 Americans. In September, the Germans announced that passenger ships would be sunk only with prior warning and appropriate safeguards for passengers.

The announced policy had its intended effect, and America remained neutral, and so did its newspapers. A July 11, 1916 New York Times carried a visit of a German submarine carrying dyestuffs to Baltimore. The two-page spread included photographs, stories of the crew, and a breezy interview with the captain, who touted his U-boat’s library, which held volumes of Shakespeare. A photograph published five months later depicted a German soldier mourning at the grave of a dead comrade.

In January 1917, Germany renewed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that it had abandoned in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania. All ships trading with Britain, including those of neutral countries such as the United States would be targets for their submarines and sunk without warning. A month later the British shared an intercepted telegram with the American government. It was from German Foreign Secretary to the German ambassador to Mexico, floating the idea of an alliance with America’s southern neighbor and Japan. If Germany and the United States went to war, Germany promised to fund Mexico’s attack on the US. Its reward would be Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, territories it had lost.

Release of the telegram ignited a public furor, further inflamed by German torpedo attacks on four US merchant ships, killing 15 Americans. President Wilson, seeing no alternative, called on congress to declare war. Still, he was hopeful that his country’s entry into the war would convince Germany to end the war. By June, however, Wilson realized Germany had no intention of surrendering. The dehumanization of Germans, a trademark of wartime propaganda, was set to begin, as well as steps to censor what newspapers could report.

Patriotic propaganda passed off as news became the norm while censorship laws, such as the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, took root. Photographs of men registering for the draft were often accompanied by an American flag in the image. Newspapers published an unending stream of patriotic and triumphant portraits of President Woodrow Wilson but there were no stories of the war told from the German perspective. The New York Times published a daily count of the states doing the most to aid the war effort--from which states brought in the most recruits to which ones purchased the most war bonds.

“As intervention became imminent,” the Library of Congress noted, “newspapers ran fewer photographs from the battlefield and replaced them with pictures of parades and training regiments. Editorial policies became even more vigorously pro-American once American soldiers began to fight in the war.”

After America’s entry into the war, The New York Times published anti-German stories with headlines intended to arouse patriotic fervor and hatred for the enemy, such as:

That last one headlined an article that read, in part:

All of these headlines underscore the prevailing majority view of the time: an insistence on patriotism, an either you-are-with-us-or-against-us, black-and-white, no-room-for-different-opinions ethos, a vigorous criticism of pacifism, an abject prejudice against immigrants or citizens of German extraction, and the portrayal of the enemy as barbaric nincompoops.

Moreover, in a matter of months, the United States had gone from being an abject isolationist to a world power/global protector of democracy. American newspapers, eschewing any pretense of objectivity or skepticism of authority, fully embraced this new role.