Fully, Freely, Fearlessly
THE TIMES · UKFIRST WAR CORRESPONDENT
The press as moral observer of its own state's military. The first time a paper sold itself by undermining the army.
The Times sent William Howard Russell to the Crimea in 1854 with a new title: Special Correspondent. Russell defined his duty in three words - fully, freely, fearlessly - and then proceeded to dismantle the British high command in print.
He reported what the generals would not: cholera, exposure, no medical facilities, soldiers dying of mismanagement before they reached a battlefield. Ministers in Parliament denied it. Russell’s dispatches arrived from 3,000 miles away and made denial impossible. An Austrian observer noted that without the English press, the British army would have perished, because Parliament would never have funded relief if the suffering remained invisible.
This was the press positioning itself as the conscience of the state during a war the state was prosecuting. The trust claim was confrontational. The Times sold its authority to readers by proving it was willing to undermine the military to save the soldier. The “embedded” journalist of the next 170 years was born in this contradiction.