Media and Military Relations during the Mexican War

In this master's thesis, Major Metzel details the impact of the media on the military and vice versa.  He delves into several topics which made the Mexican War different from those before on account of the media.  The Mexican War was the first to see reporters traveling with the army and sending dispatches to their respective papers.  Most of the reporters were from various New Orleans papers, but reporters from the New York Sun also found their way to Mexico.  Not only did they report the news, but they also sometimes sought to influence it.  Moses Beach of the NY Sun tried to engineer a peace deal and later claimed responsibility for triggering a revolution in Mexico City.  When President Polk recalled his peace envoy, Nicholas Trist, James Freaner of the New Orleans Delta convinced him to stay, which Trist did.  The treaty that Trist thereafter negotiated was not what Polk wanted.  However, the continued bad press over the war had him accept it as good enough.  General Zachary Taylor was repeatedly lionized by media reports and was soon viewed as a contender for the presidency.  He had never had presidential aspirations but was nonetheless carried to the office in the 1848 elections.  By contrast, General Winfield Scott, who had already made a run at the presidency in 1840, was given mixed reviews by the media.  Despite being the better general, Scott was viewed as less heroic because fewer of his soldiers died in combat.  Scott had a long history with the press and was able to use it to his advantage by disseminating misinformation about his strategy.  By the end of the war, he used the media to transport news, because they were faster than the military/government mail service.

The Mexican War changed the press.  In order to get a scoop on the competition, the speed at which news was transmitted increased.  At the start of the war, it took 2 weeks for news to travel from the Rio Grande to Washington.  By the end of the war, it took 2 weeks for news to travel from Mexico City to Washington.  Several New York papers agreed to share expenses to get news from the war and created the Associated Press (AP) to accomplish this.  The AP is still in operation.

Written for those not familiar with the various personalities of the war, it sometimes drags with background information.  There is a lot of repetition with the intro - meat - outro format.  Nonetheless, this is an excellent paper and highly recommended.