You Mean There Was Media Bias in 1937?

A letter of David Roman in The Times Literary Supplement:

Guernica

Sir, – Ronald Fraser’s review of Paul Preston’s We Saw Spain Die (February 27) is surprisingly misinformed for a historian of such high standing...

...Also, Fraser is remarkably naive when commenting on the “scoops” and successes of left-leaning war correspondents such as The Times’s George Steer and the Chicago Tribune’s Jay Allen. In fact, Steer’s reporting on the Guernica bombing, far from having withstood the test of time as Fraser implies, is now widely considered an unreliable piece of propaganda that overstates the number of victims and distorts facts to cast the Nationalists in the worst possible light.

Likewise, Jay Allen’s reporting on the alleged Badajoz bullring massacre (for which no other evidence exists) is shaky at best, with few facts confirmed: one of those is that he did not witness the events he reported, since he wasn’t in Badajoz at the time; just as Steer was not in Guernica during the bombing.

People were killed both in Guernica and Badajoz, many of them murdered on scant evidence. Many more were killed by the Spanish Republicans in Paracuellos del Jarama, just outside Madrid, in the biggest single atrocity of the war, while the city was chock full of foreign correspondents, most of whom chose to ignore the fact, so inconvenient for the image of the Republican cause. Ronald Fraser believes that history proved the likes of Steer and Allen right “long ago”. But it didn’t.