Brian Stewart takes an experienced foreign correspondent’s look back at daily media coverage of the drift into war through the summer of 1914. Using Canadian and international sources he analyses some of the lessons we can still learn from a day by day study of the dramatic diplomatic crisis as it enfolds in headlines and editorials.

Did the press of the time help provoke the war? Or is this one of the many myths still surrounding the most complex and perhaps most debated war in modern history? How much did journalists even know as war approached?

Mr. Stewart is particularly interested in what local papers reveal about attitudes in Toronto and throughout the nation as Canadians begin to realize the rumours of distant military mobilizations were fast turning into a clash of global giants without precedent in history. He will draw parallels with his own experience of the countdowns to war that he has covered and conclude with an overview of Canadian war coverage through to 1918.