WI: Nazi Germany bans American reporters

I recently read Assignment to Berlin by Harry Flannery (1942); he was the CBS correspondent who replaced William Shirer in Berlin in 1940. As many are aware, Shirer also wrote down his memories as a correspondent in Berlin Diary. Shirer and Flannery were two of many American reporters stationed in Berlin between September 1939 and December 1941. Censorship was rife and reporters were monitored so they did not deviate from their approved scripts. But Flannery's book made it clear that most correspondents retained their journalistic integrity and gave an accurate picture of life and events in wartime Nazi Germany. Many reporters, on their return to the US, divulged everything they were unable to say while still in Germany, causing great consternation on the part of the Nazis.

What if Goebbels banned American reporters from Germany at the outbreak of war? (Most likely the ban would apply to all neutral countries.) How might American attitudes towards the war have been different if there was no direct news coming out of Berlin? Might postwar attitudes regarding Nazi Germany have been different?
 
I recently read Assignment to Berlin by Harry Flannery (1942); he was the CBS correspondent who replaced William Shirer in Berlin in 1940. As many are aware, Shirer also wrote down his memories as a correspondent in Berlin Diary. Shirer and Flannery were two of many American reporters stationed in Berlin between September 1939 and December 1941. Censorship was rife and reporters were monitored so they did not deviate from their approved scripts. But Flannery's book made it clear that most correspondents retained their journalistic integrity and gave an accurate picture of life and events in wartime Nazi Germany. Many reporters, on their return to the US, divulged everything they were unable to say while still in Germany, causing great consternation on the part of the Nazis.

What if Goebbels banned American reporters from Germany at the outbreak of war? (Most likely the ban would apply to all neutral countries.) How might American attitudes towards the war have been different if there was no direct news coming out of Berlin? Might postwar attitudes regarding Nazi Germany have been different?
It basically would be telling, if Americans don't know or kept from information they immediately think something is up, so any bad news or unsettling news from Nazi Germany would be automatically believed more so than OTL
 
Banning American reporters from Germany would be one of the stupider things the Nazis could do. Instead of getting some news from Germany with the German government position,, all American news will be coming out of Britain, France (until June 1940) and Switzerland. And there was already plenty of bad news that had come out of Germany by September 1939, so whatever comes out of the belligerent countries and neutrals is likely to be much more negative.

As an aside, I highly recommend reading Berlin Diary. It is an excellent view of life in Germany pre-war and the early years of the war.
 
I don't know if there were many dupes who reported the nazi line, but there was a full court press effort to manipulate the neutral nations reporters. Seymour Hersh described how he was approached a number of times by Germans who tried to befriend him and give him the inside story on how just the the German cause was. His reports written for the Christian Science monitor were collectively published in 'Pattern of Conquest; in the summer of 1941.
 
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