British Readers, War Reporting and the Western Front, 1914–18

The complexity and variety of responses to war reporting during and after the First World War has been obscured by the critical re-assessment that began with works like C.E. Montague’s <i>Disenchantment</i> (1922) and Arthur Ponsonby’s <i>Falsehood in Wartime</i> (1928) in the 1920s. For Montague, the war had exposed the deceitful character of the press: ‘Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth … They felt they had found the Press out. … With a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the Press up’. The sense that the press had betrayed the public has continued to resonate through historical accounts of the period. War correspondents have been accused of ‘deliberate lies’ (Philip Knightley, <i>The First Casualty</i>), a ‘sacrifice of integrity’ (Niall Ferguson, <i>The Pity of War</i>) and of ‘betraying the suffering of the fighting men’ (Paul Moorcraft, <i>Dying for the Truth</i>). These judgements do not, however, reflect the way in which war correspondence was interpreted by readers at the time.<br></br> <br></br> Drawing on archive sources, this article maps the significant contours of readers’ responses to war reporting during the conflict. Drawing on the wide range of sources included in the Reading Experience Database, the article traces the varied and changing ways in which soldiers responded to newspapers. Then, by examining collections of private papers held at London’s Imperial War Museum, the article explores several distinctive civilian responses to the news. In doing so, the article demonstrates the complexity of responses to the news, which are not reducible to a sense of betrayal. It also illustrates ways in which readers supplemented and contextualised official news to build composite pictures of the war. British newspaper readers were both more critically aware and more varied than critics and historians writing since the 1920s have acknowledged.