‘The silence of the Sphinx’: The delay in organising media coverage of World War II

Abstract

None of those New Zealand men who served as official war correspondents in World War II are alive today to tell their stories. It is left to the media historian to try and piece together their lives and actions, always regretting that research had not started sooner. Sadly there is more information available about World War I and the life and actions of Malcolm Ross, the country’s first official war correspondent, than there is about New Zealand’s World War II correspondents. Nevertheless, remembering the work of these journalists is important, so this is a first attempt at chronicling the circumstances surrounding the appointment of the first of the official correspondents, John Herbert Hall and Robin Templeton Miller, for the 1939-45 conflict. The story of the appointment of men to cover the war, whether as press correspondents, photographers, artists or broadcasters, is one of ‘absurd delays’ which were not resolved until nearly two years of the war had passed.

Keywords

• journalism history
• New Zealand
• newspapers
• public relations
• war correspondence
• war correspondents