The Director of OWI
“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”
~Elmer Davis
Before he was appointed head of the Office of War information, Elmer Davis worked for the New York Times as a reporter and editorial writer, and for Columbia Broadcasting System as a news reporter. He soon became widely known, and was recruited as director of the Office of War Information.
Davis was respected for his handling of official propaganda and news. Not everything he did was admired, though. The liberal stance that he took, especially his opposition to military censorship, was controversial. Davis helped loosen the restrictions on graphic images and descriptions of battles. Before he was in the Office, reporters and photographers were allowed only to depict dead soldiers covered by blankets or write text that was "upbeat and bloodless". Davis helped publish the first ever picture of dead American soldiers. (Below)
[Article describing above photograph from Life Magazine]
"Here lie three Americans.
What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country?
Or shall we say that this is too horrible to look at?
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
The reason we print it now is that, last week, President Roosevelt and Elmer Davis and the War Department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.
And so here it is. This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns."
~Life Magazine