Journalism is often cited as history’s first format, especially when covering wars and international conflicts.
“Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany” explores the challenges the world’s largest news organization faced in trying to balance journalistic ethics with the ability to cover World War II within the confines of a dictatorship. Fell. This book is a fair but blunt assessment of the work of that period.
The book is co-written by two veteran journalists – Randy Hershaft and the late Larry Heinzerling – along with Columbia Journalism School Professor Emerita Ann Cooper.
It follows an in-depth 2017 review written by Hershaft and Heinzerling looking at news organization operations in Nazi Germany. This review was followed by an academic paper published a year earlier that claimed the influence of assigned Nazi propagandists on the output of the German Photo Service.
However, “Newshawks” goes beyond looking at the photo operations that were the focus of the 2017 review. It makes rich use of vast archives and other sources to provide a fascinating inside account of a journalistic era that is completely different from now but raises many of the same questions.
It examines the role of the organization’s top journalists who led its coverage and sparked controversy during it, including Berlin bureau chief Lewis Lochner and general manager Kent Cooper.
The challenges of dealing with misinformation and other news organizations sound all too familiar. A defunct “rumor deflator” launched briefly to address strange stories during the war was a precursor to the fact checking and accountability pieces that are common in journalism today.
The book richly portrays the journalistic conflicts that still resonate today, as journalists risk their lives to cover the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.
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DeMillo, an Associated Press reporter based in Little Rock, Arkansas, never met or worked with New York-based reporters Randy Hershaft and Larry Heinzerling.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
