News Coverage

[Towntalk]

Over the past couple of months I have been building a library of old time radio programs and part of them dealt with news coverage of World War II.

Today I saved news coverage of the Battle at Iwo Jima and was wondering just how today's reporters would have covered it.

The reporter was embedded with the Marines and was broadcasting as the landing took place, and while his reporting was censored as were all news stories during the war, the picture he gave his listeners really gave them a real flavor of what our boys were up against.

When compared to today's reporters those war correspondents were not recriminating President Roosevelt and dwelling on the number of American troops killed.

When I built my collection of D-Day coverage, the same kind of reporting was evident whether it was CBS, or NBC, and nothing like today.

Again, I realize that the war news was censored, and I do take that into consideration, and certainly WWII and today's wars are quite different but still I wonder just how different the outcome would be if Washington did censor much of the war news today.