Americans bemoan the state of the news media. But whatever its shortcomings, the recent coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine has provided journalism of a volume, immediacy and basic accuracy that puts to shame coverage of the last major European war. While 80 years ago, the press touted World War II as the "best reported war in history," it looks less like that today. In fact, romanticizing the putative Good War should not obscure the reality that Americans judged the war's progress based on reduced, delayed and sanitized reporting from the front. The news from Ukraine throws those limitations into sharp relief.

World War II occurred in a different communications landscape, a simpler pre-digital one where Americans read newspapers, listened to radio broadcasts and watched newsreels in movie theaters. Technological challenges — most notably, the inconsistency of cable telegraphy and radio transmission — hampered reporting. But an elaborately woven system of information management also starved Americans of salient war news.

Voluntary press censorship administered by the Office of Censorship steered the press away from sensitive subjects (from troop movements to weather) and encouraged, but did not require, pre-publication vetting by the government. This voluntary censorship provoked no outrage. Instead, it was celebrated. After the war ended, journalists and government officials commended the OC's director, Byron Price, for keeping information from the enemy without shutting off its flow at home. Price was also lauded as an effective mediator between the press and authorities when conflicts arose.

However, the military's censorship did deprive Americans of important wartime information. The Navy, for example, hid the true losses at Pearl Harbor until the very end of the war. Doing so made sense early in the war, to prevent the Japanese from learning how much damage they had inflicted. By 1945, it no longer made sense to obscure these losses. But the powerful chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, set official policy, and he believed, as the press quipped, that the Navy owed the public only one communique: the one at the end, declaring ultimate victory.

Military authorities also wanted to suppress any material that might prove inconvenient or embarrassing to them, and they could do so using prohibitions against stories that threatened Allied unity or morale. During the campaign in French North Africa that began in November 1942, for instance, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower installed a repressive Vichyite regime there, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain's senior deputy, which continued to arrest political opponents and enforce antisemitic edicts. When journalists and politicians across the political spectrum decried the signal this sent to occupied Europe — with the Allies merely replacing one authoritarian regime with another — Eisenhower banned all reporting from North Africa. After protests from Washington and London, Eisenhower abruptly ended this censorship but thereafter continued to prohibit reporting that he feared might damage Allied solidarity, even if it did not threaten military security.

War correspondents also censored themselves. Experienced reporters such as Homer Bigart, Ernie Pyle and Andy Rooney boasted that since they understood what they could not write at any moment, censors barely had to touch their copy. Yet this self-censorship further shrank the stream of war news. A notorious instance occurred when the press corps in the Mediterranean, after a discussion with Eisenhower, agreed not to report Gen. George Patton's abuse of two enlisted men in Sicily in 1943. In this case, formal censorship was unnecessary. Eisenhower merely confided to reporters that he thought Patton was too valuable to lose, and the correspondents decided on their own not to file the story. When columnist Drew Pearson finally broke the news in Washington months later, the public was as appalled at the press for its suppression as it was at Patton for his conduct.

Military officials in this era routinely used similar off-the-record briefings and private contacts with journalists to shape news coverage. After the war, Americans learned that Army Chief of Staff George Marshall had perfected this technique by briefing a select group of influential editors confidentially to gain their approval of the War Department's actions. In one early instance, he met with the group several times to frame the long delays in news from French North Africa as inevitable and to tamp down criticism of Eisenhower's imposition of political censorship.

The United States and Britain ultimately grew so confident in their ability to control information through these practices that they tried to delay word of Germany's unconditional surrender from reaching the public for a full two days. They imposed the news embargo to satisfy their Russian allies, who wanted to orchestrate their own surrender ceremony in Berlin. Incredibly, almost all reporters who witnessed the surrender agreed to hold the pressing news.

But one Associated Press representative, Paris bureau chief Ed Kennedy, refused to do so and reported the surrender. When he did, the press corps in Paris was furious - not at military officials for imposing the embargo but at the AP for breaking it. The scoop cost Kennedy his career.

While officials and journalists rarely overtly shared false information with the public, they routinely deceived by omission. "It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies," John Steinbeck wrote, looking back at his reporting from Italy in 1943.

This media-military connection continued into the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy, for one, reminded an audience of newspaper publishers in 1961 that "in time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort, based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy." He thanked the publishers for being similarly cooperative as the country confronted the Soviet Union.

Vietnam changed this relationship.

A younger generation of journalists could not reconcile what they had seen in the field with the military's overly optimistic briefings in Saigon — news briefings that reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan began mocking as the "five o'clock follies." World War II-era journalists in Vietnam, such as Drew Middleton and Marguerite Higgins, also lost faith in the briefings, albeit more slowly.

In 1968, Seymour Hersh's reporting of the My Lai Massacre in the New York Times and Walter Cronkite's unvarnished commentary televised on CBS News during the Tet Offensive were watershed moments in this turn toward more accurate wartime coverage. By the end of that war, the formal and informal controls on information in place during World War II had largely disappeared. The gap between what was occurring on the ground and what military and political officials were reporting had grown too wide for journalists.

Subsequent conflicts have been covered with varying degrees of military interference and effective reporting. On the one hand, the military all but excluded the press from the invasions of Granada and Panama in the 1980s. On the other, technological advances allowed for new types of information to reach the public. For example, CNN's dramatic broadcasts from a hotel room in Baghdad showing American missiles falling at the start of the Gulf War in 1991 provided real-time coverage from the very beginning of that conflict.

More recently, increased press access in Iraq and Afghanistan unearthed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and by Blackwater mercenaries — two stories that the government would have preferred to bury and probably would have in World War II.

The legacy of these changes in reporting over time is evident today in Ukraine. The coverage has benefited news consumers and become a powerful weapon for the Ukrainians. The Zelensky government has not only allowed, but also encouraged, independent coverage and has resisted the impulse to deploy World War II-type controls. Astonishingly, Ukraine accredited more than 1,300 foreign journalists within days of the Russian attack. By comparison, in 1939, fewer than two dozen foreign correspondents reported from Poland after the German invasion. Ukraine has used the extensive, immediate and credible reporting on the ground to build public support at home and abroad with stunning success.

In World War II, U.S. authorities believed morale could be maintained only if the public was sheltered from the war's harsher realities. Officials in Ukraine today have wagered that allowing the media much greater latitude will only benefit their cause. That gamble seems to be paying off.

Richard Fine is emeritus professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. His book, "The Surrender Fiasco: How the Military Tangled with the Media as the Second World War Ended," is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.