Turning Points with Hitler 

by Matthew Sousa

No one wanted war but when Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, other European countries felt they had to act. The result was six long years of World War II and it became a definitive and turning point in broadcast history.

In World War II most Americans received their information about the war from newspaper reports and radio broadcasts. They were allowed to form their image of war in their own minds. They were not confronted with the actual vivid imagery of battle and carnage of the conflict. For the most part the war was portrayed by the media in a positive and heroic manner in the print. This helped to create consensus of the American public in support of the war.

When Hitler took power in Germany he also took over the media, and he used it to shape a modern, civilized country to his ends. With full control of the national press his propaganda minister Paul Josef Goebbels developed sophisticated and very effective tools of propaganda to control public opinion in Germany, and even in other countries. Propaganda may be the most dangerous weapon developed in the Second World War.

He proved that if you repeat a lie often enough in mass media, most people will accept it as the truth.

Hitler's regime and death were turning points in broadcast because this man essentially started a world war that would come to be known as the living room war. This is a time when broadcast journalism, in the form of radio broadcasts, really came into its own, with figures such as Edward Murrow and Richard Dimbleby producing some of their best work during this time. This is when broadcast journalism truly began to be way more than just a bland way of getting news and could envision what was going on through the crafted words of radio journalists. Hitler and his second world war changed the face of radio journalism as we know it.