PRESS PASS-IVE
“Any person with the slightest spark of honor left in him will take good care in the future not to become a journalist.” – Joseph Goebbels, Former Chancellor of the German Reich
On Friday, April 12, the Berlin police shut down a pro-Palestine conference soon after it began. Keynote speakers of the “Palestine Congress,” Yanis Varoufakis, Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Salman Abu Sitta,” were issued a “Betätigungsverbot” by Germany’s Interior Ministry—a ban on any and all political activity.
Last week, and closer to home, former National Enquirer publisher, David Pecker, testified that he used his editorial power to bury stories about former President Donald Trump during the 2016 election. Pecker admitted that the Enquirer paid off two sources that might expose Trump’s sexual misconduct, but never published the stories—a furtive technique referred to as a “catch and kill” in the news industry.
Now, back to that first quote.
Goebbels is believed to have said that in private, shortly after Kristallnacht—a WWII era pogrom committed by the Nazi regime against Jews, or the “Night of Broken Glass.” In its wake, Germany established Schriftleitergesetz, or Editor’s Law, as to relegate journalism to a wartime instrument of the state. More recently, Goebbels’ lecturing was published in Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft’s new book, Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany.
Newshawks tells the story of producing news under a dictator’s thumb, and the ethical compromises inherent to that endeavor. It recounts the goings-on at the Associated Press (AP) Bureau in Berlin during the Second World War, under the leadership of Louis P. Lochner.
“The result in this book,” write Messrs. Herschaft and Heinzerling in the Introduction, “is an account of AP’s … war coverage, their battles with the Nazi hierarchy, their professional rivalries, their self-censorship, their life in wartime Berlin, and an account of … coverage of the Holocaust as it unfolded.”
At the time, AP was the world’s largest news organization, reaching a circulation of roughly 34 million readers through its subscribing outlets. In wartime, AP news bites and photographs (through AP’s German photo agency, AP GmbH) were critical in a pre-TV, radio-infantile era. The way it worked was that the Associated Press fed news to the capital N, News. The AP, as a cooperative, did not publish directly, but instead disseminated the information collected from its foreign bureaus to subscribing newsrooms. From there, local papers were free to cut, rewrite, and change the raw facts as they saw fit.
These “local gatekeepers” as the book’s authors call them, were journalists with “personal biases and different views on news, on local interests, and on just how threatening Nazi Germany was to the United States and the rest of the world.”
Barring biases, anyway, the chain of command from an AP bureau, to a bumpkin editor-in-chief, to a local news desk, was more or less like a game of telephone. The facts were often misconstrued and the narrative of a story was often distorted the further it moved down the line.
“How one individual story was played could look very different across the country,” said Ann Cooper in a recent interview—Professor Emerita at Columbia, wife of the late Heinzerling, and collaborator on the book.
In truth, the most visceral and expository news consolidated at the Berlin Bureau never made it out beyond the borders of the Third Reich.
Any news that might be revelatory to the enemy was forboden. The early and sanctioned persecution of Jews. Reports hinting at the changing winds of internal party politics. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, even reports of the weather were stymied, lest they reveal information about German military strategy.
AP Correspondent, Melvin Whiteweather, wrote that the sanctions were like working with “a sort of Damocles sword, eternally hanging overhead.” American reporters, should they cross these “red lines,” risked expulsion or arrest.
From these restrictions and their associated consequences was born a practice of self-censorship under Lochner (who, it bears noting, was born to German parents and remained in the country post-war). One of the book’s key anecdotes recalls Michael Siegel, a Jewish lawyer, lodging a complaint to the Munich police about recent anti-Semitic violence in the city. Siegel was beaten by the police until his eardrum burst, his pants were cut off at the knees, and a placard was placed around his neck translating to “I will never again complain to the police.”
Munich photographer, Heinrich Sanden, offered photographs to Lochner. Lochner rejected them.
“It is more important to remain in the field here … than to risk having our whole organization destroyed by publishing a picture to which the regime in power objects,” said Lochner, in his own defense to AP’s subscribing papers. They had seen the “licked” photos after their eventual release by William Randolph Heart’s photo agency.
Hmm.
If nothing else (nothing), Goebbels—who was described by Time magazine, at the time, as a “barking, brawling, screaming propaganda maniac,” and “one of the great political orators of this century”—may have issued a prescient warning about the direction of journalism. Take out the personal accountability piece for a second (journalists, in theory, abide by the Walter Williams ethics creed in much the same way doctors swear to the Hippocratic Oath and lawyers recite their various Oaths of Admission). Journalists, and the work they produce, are directly accountable to the record of history. And unfortunately, so much of that record has nothing to do with contemporary writing, itself. If Newshawks in Berlin is to teach us anything, it’s that truth is objective in peacetime. Truth in wartime, though, is handled like an object.
As Americans, we were predisposed to the faith that news, always, gets drunk from a firehose. In the War Against Totalitarianism, Heinzerling and Herschaft reveal that we were drinking from a bottleneck. But, as the Nazis were plundering the finest museums, archives, and Jewish homes on the European continent, Raubkunst, in the effort to curate a collection for the Führer—so too were they enacting curatorial decisions over which wartime regularities and atrocities could reach American audiences. And even after reaching US soil, that commodification was complete. Over 1,200 news outlets used AP Berlin as a source. When AP Berlin reported in 1942 that the Nazis had annihilated two million Jews, the story was buried on page 6 of the Washington Post. The New York Times ran a shortened version. Most papers didn’t run it at all. In the days following Kristallnacht, there was a widely released photo of a Jewish shopkeeper sweeping the glass out from the entryway of his shattered storefront. But the photo had been altered. While researching for the book in 2018, the Newshawks authors had discovered the uncropped version in a London archive. It reveals German police officers in the frame standing by, and watching—an image that contradicts what German propagandists had dismissed at the time (for the benefit of international readers) as a spontaneous uprising amongst incendiaries.
Manicuring the news is no less dangerous than banning it outright. For that reason, I am unsure that Lochner was right. Bowing to a dictator by not indicting that dictator was itself a practice of appeasement. Bleaching stories about just how far the Final Solution to the Jewish Question had gone led an American public to believe it really wasn’t that bad. Today, whether it’s the silencing of inflammatory voices, or the catching and killing of inconvenient truths—in countries which, now, claim constitutional protections for a free press, mind you—Newshawks in Berlin’s subject reminds that censorship does not have to be total to be effective. To get the cropped version of a picture is to not understand the picture, at all.
A written account of the news is only as good as its source material. And when that material is manipulated—self-censored, cropped, warped, and buried—journalism becomes a casualty of conflict. That’s a death, enduring.
