Commanders, Correspondents, and the Constitution: The Birth of Conflict between the Military and the Free Press during the Civil War
by Rob Dean
The emergence of mass-distribution newspapers in the decades before the American Civil War forced U.S. military leaders to face one of the stickiest dilemmas for their democracy. The desire of free people to know about their military collided with the need for military leaders to plan strategy and deploy troops without the enemy knowing the details of those plans.
News from the battlefield sold a lot of newspapers because Americans were eager to know what was happening. News from the front lines also angered generals and politicians. Some feared that news stories revealed information the enemy could use as one more weapon against the United States. Others were convinced that incomplete or inaccurate reports caused political division or damaged morale among civilians and troops alike. During the Civil War, those concerns grew so serious that the government and the military censored the news.
The clash of competing interests grew from the serious fact that making war, as it always had been, was a grave matter. The soldiers' choice to kill or be killed was the human condition at its most raw. News coverage amplified for the public the danger and thrill of war, and that meant readers rushed to buy the latest dispatches. After all, the conduct of war represented public interest in its purest form. News coverage informed the great mass of people who supplied manpower to the army, who defined morale, and who either endorsed or rejected war through the exercise of political and economic power. But to military men, news coverage also had the potential to harm.
https://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/civilwar/articles/commandersandcensors.aspx
