The mass mobilization of the British Home Front that was necessary to fight the First World War presented the wartime government with a heightened challenge: maintaining morale during a war that, through its unprecedented destruction, would shake the very foundations of European society. At the onset of war in 1914, the press had a general reputation as the ‘fourth estate’, there to check governmental malfeasance as it had during the Crimean and Boer Wars. These past conflicts had made politicians acutely aware of the power the press had over public wartime attitudes, as well as of the liability that a critical independent press could pose during a war with levels of civilian involvement and loss never before seen. Monitoring and shaping public
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Harnessing the popular press for propaganda purposes proved essential, as the readership of these papers would become the soldier filling the trenches of France. Government propagandists were aware that you did not reach the masses through logic, but rather through stories of German atrocities or British bravery that appealed to the common man’s, “vocabulary, prejudices, and enthusiasms...” As noted by The Times journalist Michael McDonagh, anti-German sentiment existed before the war, “[Germany] has always been disliked and distrusted for her bullying policy…[and] symbols of violence and brute force.” Much to the satisfaction of the government, newspaper coverage of Germans reflected and fomented these existing prejudices helping to create the caricature of an enemy so vile that it became every Briton’s duty to join the fight against it. Anti-German propaganda in the popular press often took the form of racial attacks against the largely innocent German population within Britain. The Daily Mail called for people to refuse service from German or Austrian waiters, while stories of German agents in the Home Front bred fear and paranoia about those with Germanic or even just foreign names, exemplified in the Morning Post’s cry to ‘Intern them all’. The exaggerated and often false stories of German atrocities on the Western Front presented as fact to the public by the national newspaper press, fueled anti-German sentiment at
Harnessing the popular press for propaganda purposes proved essential, as the readership of these papers would become the soldier filling the trenches of France. Government propagandists were aware that you did not reach the masses through logic, but rather through stories of German atrocities or British bravery that appealed to the common man’s, “vocabulary, prejudices, and enthusiasms...” As noted by The Times journalist Michael McDonagh, anti-German sentiment existed before the war, “[Germany] has always been disliked and distrusted for her bullying policy…[and] symbols of violence and brute force.” Much to the satisfaction of the government, newspaper coverage of Germans reflected and fomented these existing prejudices helping to create the caricature of an enemy so vile that it became every Briton’s duty to join the fight against it. Anti-German propaganda in the popular press often took the form of racial attacks against the largely innocent German population within Britain. The Daily Mail called for people to refuse service from German or Austrian waiters, while stories of German agents in the Home Front bred fear and paranoia about those with Germanic or even just foreign names, exemplified in the Morning Post’s cry to ‘Intern them all’. The exaggerated and often false stories of German atrocities on the Western Front presented as fact to the public by the national newspaper press, fueled anti-German sentiment at