cover image Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage of World War II

Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage of World War II

Frederick S. Voss. Smithsonian Books, $26.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-1-56098-348-4

The highlights of this companion volume to an upcoming exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery are 121 photographs and illustrations, including such famous images as Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Iwo Jima and Margaret Bourke-White's picture of the liberation of the prisoners at Buchenwald. Also compelling are reprints of famous news stories and broadcasts by, among others, Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow. The narrative is thorough and serviceable, if somewhat plodding, but more problematic is the haphazard organization of the chapters. The ten chapters (each of which opens with a brief introduction and a biographical profile) are arranged chronologically by type of media (broadcasting, photojournalism, painting, cartoons), by race or gender, by style (``Mavericks,'' featuring Hemingway is one example) and by subject (``Dawn of the Atomic Age''). Also troubling is the sometimes inconsistent tone: for instance, after a lengthy cataloguing of General MacArthur's blatant manipulation of the press (tampering with photo captions to make it seem that MacArthur was on the front, for example), these actions are apologetically dismissed: ``MacArthur did indeed emerge from the war, in the eyes of many Americans, as a nearly flawless military genius. But in light of his genuinely good performance in the Pacific, that might have occurred without his press office's efforts to make it happen.'' Still, a general overview of American journalism's place in World War II has been wanting, and this volume satisfies that need quite competently. (May)