Press Accreditation in Wartime During the 19th Century

This study highlights how military-press relations evolved in the 19th century towards institutionalising press accreditation during the armed conflicts with the aim of gaining the public trust and promoting the reputation of military organisations by managing the information release to audiences. A special focus is on the nascent press accreditation practices used by the military when interacting with correspondents sent by European and North American publications to cover, first-hand, the Eastern Question events unfolding on the battlefields of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), in which Romania fought to win its national independence. The study reveals the crystallisation of Public Relations techniques and procedures in wartime – press officers’ appointment, written regulations on the terms and conditions for the press accreditation, ground rules for correspondents’ access to press briefings, interviews and documentation activities at combat units as members of press pools or as embedded journalists. These practices are enshrined nowadays in the Public Relations policies on media relations, and their emergence deserves better recognition in the history of communication sciences.