Crimean War-Little Censorship
war correspondents, telegraphy, newspapers, poetry & public opinion
The Crimean War took place from October 1853 to February 1856— Russia versus the alliance made up of France, the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and Sardinia.1
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.2
It was the first war in which reports were sent swiftly to the general public and published in newspapers. The war became a stage for the display of innovative technologies ranging from telegraphy to photography, railways to steamships, and ironclads to sanitary hospitals.3 The dominance of the newspaper press depended on an extraordinary freedom in reporting that allowed correspondents to comment in detail on British organizational and strategic failures.
The British government was caught off guard as war correspondents reported on actual events in close to real time.
The freedom of the press did not go uncontested.
Politicians and military commanders remarked frequently on the dangers accompanying the technological advances that had brought about the success of the newspapers. The freedom of the press that constituted the experience of the Crimean War was also a victim of it.4
when Britain next became involved in a major war— against the Boers—censorship was accepted as necessary and just, and it became the dominating feature of the reporting of the First World War, crushing correspondents into virtual silence.5
Robert B. Edgerton (1999). Death or Glory: the legacy of the Crimean War (Basic Books, Boulder, CO, 1999).
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, LORD TENNYSON (1854). The Charge of the Light Brigade was a failed military action involving the British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854.
Bektas Y. (2017). “The Crimean War as a Technological Enterprise.” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. 71(3):233-262.
Baker, Ken (2009). The Crimean War and the Freedom of the Press. Schools.History.Com
Knightley, Philip (2003). The First Casualty: The War Correspondent As Hero, Propagandist Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. London: Deutsch, 2003.