![]() ![]() Not all war reporting was done by soldiers. How were the newspapers to get their news, unless they had people on the spot? As journalism became more professionalized, some very successful papers started to be able to afford to send their own people out, which they certainly were doing in the 1890s. In the Boer War he went out as a journalist, then joined in the fighting, didn’t he? But in the Sudan he was actually a commissioned officer who was taking money from The Morning Post. Having operated as a journalist in that context made him less forgiving and less understanding, later, of journalists who he thought were doing things contrary to his government’s interests, basically by being openly critical of him or his ministers. ![]() There were strict limits to what you should and should not say. He was trying to be a little bit controversial, a little bit provocative, but he was doing so with an understanding that he was governed by the rules of censorship-particularly when he was a serving soldier, and also as a journalist. In some ways, as a young man, he was pushing the envelope a bit. They were restored, and it turned out to be a little bit of a storm in a teacup, but Churchill said in the House of Commons, “Well, I would never have been allowed, when a correspondent during the Boer War, to use the expression, ‘The situation is desperate.’” At the time of the Anzio landings, when things were going badly wrong, there was a minor crisis when British journalists had their press credentials withdrawn because they were alleged to be spreading despair. That background also influenced him when he was prime minister. ![]() He was a very good journalist, very interesting, and certainly one of the most highly paid. And then he exploded onto the scene when, as a young man in the 1890s, he joined the army and wrote journalistic accounts of small wars, starting in Cuba, then the North-West Frontier in India, then the Sudan, then the Boer War. As the son of a well-known politician, Lord Randolph Churchill, he got occasional mentions through his childhood and his teenage years. So that was his first mention in the press. His birth was reported in The Times, actually on the front page, which in those days carried these little personal ads. What’s your focus in the book?Ĭhurchill: A Life in the News takes the story from his birth. Churchill was making the news even before he became a politician, as a soldier, but also, quite literally, as a journalist. Your most recent book is Churchill: A Life in the News.
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