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These excerpts were taken from Reporting America At War - a series that ran on PBS that has also been released as a book:
It should be known that he is referring to World War II in that paragraph.
He goes on, this time about Vietnam.
If you don't understand the context of his previous argument, the following quote will shock you to tears. Read carefully, and read over and over again.
I don't see his point about how the German people "bore the responsibility", after all, they were living under a fascist regime, and were forced to vote for Adolf Hitler. However, censorship taken to its extremity is propaganda. He appears to have an entirely different argument on military censorship in wartime - that an obsession with death tolls rather than progress is a dangerous thing to have back home. On that, I agree with Cronkite.
"[Censorship] would begin with a simple statement: 'You can't print that!' Then you'd find out why. There were certain things we knew weren't going to pass. We tried to get by with them because we were trying to report everything we could. But casualties, for instance - they weren't anxious to let the enemy know how successful they had been in any given action, how many lives they'd claimed, how much materiel they'd destroyed, the disposition of forces, where the various forces were and what they were equipped with, what kind of vehicles they had, what kind of guns they had. All that kind of thing was pretty much always held up. We could write about it, which we did. We could say that losses were heavy or losses were light. We just couldn't give specifics."
It should be known that he is referring to World War II in that paragraph.
He goes on, this time about Vietnam.
"They should have had censorship in Vietnam. I believe there should be censorship in wartime. I believe it absolutely firmly. I'm more comfortable when we are clear that our reporting is not putting our troops in jeopardy and making the job more difficult and prolonging the killing. I also understand that the military, in exercising that censorship, definately needs a civilian appeals court - civilian-trained individuals [who] understand the right of the people we know."
If you don't understand the context of his previous argument, the following quote will shock you to tears. Read carefully, and read over and over again.
"In the future, I would hope that democracies will understand that the people have to know what their young people are doing in their name. When we got to Germany after the war, these rosy-cheeked German people came to us with tears in their eyes, pleading that they didn't know what was going on under Hitler. That was their fault. They bore the responsibility because they approved the censorship that Hitler put in, and once they approved that censorship and the people were denied the right to know, they became as guilty as the perpetrators."
I don't see his point about how the German people "bore the responsibility", after all, they were living under a fascist regime, and were forced to vote for Adolf Hitler. However, censorship taken to its extremity is propaganda. He appears to have an entirely different argument on military censorship in wartime - that an obsession with death tolls rather than progress is a dangerous thing to have back home. On that, I agree with Cronkite.