American war reporting came of age with the Mexican War, just as
our nation's newspapers were gaining new prominence through the
headline-hawking "penny press." Indeed, the Mexican War was the
first to be comprehensively reported in the daily press, with at
least thirteen full-time correspondents covering the military
campaigns conducted south of the border. Tom Reilly highlights the
synergistic relationship between battlefield reporters and the rise
of modern commercial journalism, providing riveting eyewitness
accounts of the war and new insights into the press's profound
impact on national politics and perceptions. With editorial
assistance from Manley Witten, Reilly reconstructs the efforts,
methods, lifestyles, achievements, and failures of America's first
war correspondents, the brutal campaigns they covered, and the
journalistic system in which they functioned. Giving ample and
vivid voice to the reporters themselves--including George Wilkins
Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune, James L. Freaner of the New
Orleans Delta, William C. Tobey of the Philadelphia North American,
John Warland of the Boston Atlas, and Jane McManus Storms of the
New York Sun--Reilly reveals how they braved the dangers of combat,
witnessed the horrors and heroics of war, cultivated sources, and
ultimately wrote it all down for distribution back home. At the
same time, as Reilly makes clear, they sometimes juggled facts as
they saw fit, representing viewpoints of every political and social
stripe and often glorifying events with nationalistic fervor.
Reilly tracks the transmission of wartime reports by boat,
horseback, and telegraph from the battlefields and army camps to
readers in American cities--where big news often meant an "extra
edition" to be hawked by the growing armies of newsboys. And, more
generally, he provides an excellent overview of the condition of
American journalism in the mid-to-late 1840s--particularly
newspapers in New Orleans, which were crucial to the overall
coverage of the war. While there have been a great many books
written on the Mexican War, this is the first to tell its history
through the eyes of the reporters who covered it on the ground--at
no little risk to their own lives--and to show how that effort
signaled the emergence of newspapers as an important force in
American life.
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