Celebrated reporter Richard Harding Davis (left) poses with French officers near Verdun in 1915.

In 1915, while the United States was still neutral in World War I, former President Theodore Roosevelt pleaded with the British to lift their ban on war correspondents. Perhaps remembering how Richard Harding Davis' odes to T.R.'s military prowess had helped his career, Roosevelt argued that the dearth of coverage was hindering the growth of American public support for Great Britain and its allies. (Meanwhile, Davis himself, still chasing after war stories, dodged the ban by hooking up with French forces fighting in the sector south of the British lines.)

The British solution was to accredit a few handpicked reporters who could be depended upon to distort facts at the government's behest. (One of their most ignominious accomplishments: portraying the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in which the Germans butchered the British, as a stirring victory.) To the government's frustration, British papers got around the censorship in part by interviewing wounded soldiers who had returned from the front, and gave the public a truer picture of their leaders' ineptitude and the brutal waste of lives.

When President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the controversial war in 1917, his administration took no such chances with the press. Congress passed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, whose restrictions not only silenced antiwar protesters but also made it difficult for American reporters to cover military operations.

In the field, Gen. John Pershing, commander of the U.S. forces, took a particularly dim view of journalists. He accredited only 31 correspondents, whose newspapers were required to post a $10,000 bond to keep them on good behavior, and kept them trapped in camps far away from the front lines. The Chicago Tribune's Henrietta Eleanor Hull, the first accredited woman correspondent, wasn't even allowed that close and had to spend the war in Paris.

As a result, their dispatches were nearly as worthless as those filed by government-appointed British journalists, who were bullied into writing accounts of fictitious Allied victories. Novelist Ernest Hemingway, an ambulance driver during the war, once acidly noted that the only good reportage that came out of the war was done by poets, since the latter "are not arrested as quickly as prose writers."