It has long been a staple of the historical analysis of the Irish revolution that two of its key battlegrounds were British and Irish public opinion, and that Dáil Eireann's 1919–21 counterstate was most effective at projecting an image of genuinely popular government, while IRA violence is best understood as a kind of psychological warfare. And, as with every other aspect of the struggle, they succeeded in outsmarting their inept British adversaries and won the propaganda war. Until recently, however, such conclusions had not been matched by much in the way of systematic research or analysis—not since D. G. Boyce's pioneering Englishmen and Irish Troubles first tackled the subject in 1972.

However, thanks to the recent boom in Irish history—and particularly this period of history—the press and propaganda are historiographical growth industries. Ben Novick's Conceiving Revolution (2001), Brian Murphy's The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland (2006), Maurice Walsh's The News from Ireland (2008), and a shoal of articles, most notably by Keiko Inoue, have addressed both the machinery and the content of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary spin. Kenneally's book does overlap Murphy's and Inoue's work to some extent, and draws on Walsh's original thesis, but it is still the first to attempt to describe and assess both protagonists in the propaganda war, as well as to examine how newspapers acted and reacted.

The structure of the book is straightforward. The first chapter is devoted to the British effort, which only really got going in the summer of 1920 when Basil Clarke, a former journalist, was appointed to head Dublin Castle's Public Information Branch. He tried gamely to institute a coherent strategy but was regularly undermined by the police and army, both of which had their own publicity men. The government also had considerable powers of censorship, which it was willing to use against the “mosquito press” as well as ordinary newspapers deemed to cause disaffection. If that didn’t work, angry Black and Tans (British ex-soldiers recruited as Irish policemen) might pay a call to an offending newsroom or printing press, to make their views forcibly known.

The second chapter deals with Dáil Éireann's Ministry of Propaganda (later renamed Publicity, as the word was already acquiring a taint), whose own former journalists usually outperformed their opposite numbers. Their great success story was the Irish Bulletin, a newsletter sent to British and foreign journalists, politicians, and other commentators, cataloging police and military violence, as well as the Dáil's constructive work. The whole operation was a triumph of revolutionary engineering, run on a tight budget and relentlessly hunted, but never missing an issue. The Bulletin was widely seen as much more credible than the official story, especially as presented by the utterly uncredible Chief Secretary, Hamar Greenwood.

With these organizational matters out of the way, each of the remaining chapters follows a daily newspaper through the 1919–21 struggle. The first two were both national and nationalist: the Freeman's Journal and Irish Independent. After this comes the regional (and somewhat less militant) Cork Examiner, followed by the unionist Irish Times, and, to cap it off, the ultraestablishment London Times. Each chapter discusses the twists and turns of editorial policy, reactions to particular events in Ireland and to government policy (everyone denounced the 1920 Government of Ireland Act), run-ins with the police or IRA, and the general state of reportage. Unfortunately, while these chapters are individually interesting, reading them in succession is not much fun, as repetitions accumulate. In general, it seems fair to say that the book is most successful as a kind of reference work, whose nicely compact and accessible accounts of departments and newspapers will no doubt be turned to many times by historians and students. It is already on my course reading lists.

Kenneally does have an overarching argument: that the British government's “blend of heavy-handed censorship, intimidation and propaganda” (166) failed badly, partly because of its sheer brutality and incompetence but partly also because it was so out of sync with the Wilsonian spirit of the times and with Britain's own sense of what it had been fighting for and against in the Great War. Comparisons between “Prussianism” and Black and Tannery were widely made, which made things very easy for republican publicists: they could happily stay on the offensive and did not have to worry overmuch about defending the IRA's actions. Nevertheless, Kenneally suggests, the lion's share of the credit for influencing Irish public opinion goes to Irish editors and reporters themselves, particularly as Dáil efforts were focused outside the country, in Britain and the United States.

These are sensible enough conclusions, backed up by good research in archives and at the dreaded microfilm reader. What is missing, though, is context. Kenneally sticks pretty rigidly to his start and end points, so the reader has very little idea of what was said and done before 1919. Yet, this is crucial to what came next, as the mass nationalist embrace of Sinn Féin, and rejection of British rule, took place during the Great War. Arguably, by the time the rival propaganda machines got going, in 1919 and 1920, the war for most of Ireland's hearts and minds was already over.

Also crucially absent is Ulster unionism—and Ulster, period. There are three Dublin papers studied, one from Cork, and one from London—but the third side of the Irish political triangle is missing. Surely it is vital to understand how northern Protestants (and Catholics) saw things? Here is yet another manifestation of the still-prevalent partitionism in revolutionary historiography: north is north and south is south, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, there already is a book on Ulster unionist newspapers from 1919 onward, Denis Kennedy's The Widening Gulf (1988), but it doesn’t appear in Kenneally's bibliography. This is also symptomatic of a general lack of engagement with other historians, who might occasionally be applauded or chided in the endnotes but aren’t debated with in the main text. This ultimately reduces the scholarly value of what is otherwise a valuable and well-presented book.