Misreading the Reporter's Role
KIRK, DONALD
Misreading the Reporter's Role The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam-The War Correspondent As Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker By Phillip Knightley Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 465 pp....
...He repeatedly cites, for instance, an Esquire article by Michael Herr that described the Saigon press corps in terms of a few marginal characters...
...Perhaps no other conflict attracted such a galaxy of idealists and cynics, radicals and Rightists, famed intellectuals and forgotten hacks...
...Phillip Knightley, a London Sunday Times writer who himself has never covered a battlefront, is best at recording history...
...While General Douglas MacArthur was "shielding the nation from reality" in the Pacific, reporters on the other side of the world were being duped by the British and American governments with exaggerated claims of Allied successes and enemy defeats...
...His descriptions of reporting during the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese conflict and the Spanish-American War demonstrate not only the evolution of war reporting but its role in the overall context of each situation...
...Skillfully mingling anecdote with history, he recounts one fiasco after another: journalists running to the wrong front, overlooking entire campaigns, jumping to incorrect conclusions...
...The failure of reporters to get the truth is the theme of this extremely uneven treatment of war journalism since the Crimean War...
...We were cheerleaders," one correspondent wrote 30 years after the War had ended...
...It wasn't journalism at all.' Knightley wholeheartedly shares this view...
...They, too, are creatures of their backgrounds and, like politicians and military officers, have no special corner of eternal truth all to themselves...
...More often than not, they are rather pedestrian types, with a mild, slightly unorthodox flare for adventure, but a marked preference for the comfortable atmosphere of the hotel lobby, dining room and bar...
...Most correspondents, Knightley claims, have been victims of this kind of myopia...
...former war correspondent in Vietnam Truth, Senator Hiram Johnson observed as the United States was entering World War I, is "the first casualty" of hostilities...
...and once U.S...
...Reviewed by Donald Kirk Reporter, Chicago "Tribune...
...That none of us can escape the straitjacket of the time and place we happen to live in is a commonplace, but it is a commonplace which Knightley, in his eagerness to debunk war correspondents, appears to have forgotten...
...In addition, war correspondents are not necessarily the most brilliant people...
...Indeed, as the example of the Boer War suggests, correspondents, far from penetrating to the truth, have often been collaborators in the process of myth-making...
...The patriotic hysteria that swept Britain had a strong influence on war reporting...
...Thus, before introducing his chapter on the Boer War he says: "Certainly when their own country was involved, as Britain was in South Africa, the attitude of the war correspondent and his readers was markedly different...
...In general, the British press ignored the substance of the conflict, failing to grasp the importance of guerrilla tactics in a nationalist struggle—or to recognize the cruelty of British officers burning farms and herding citizens into concentration camps...
...Few are great authors...
...Baden-Powell became "the hero of the siege of Mafeking" because the five newspapermen following him around either could not or would not report the reality of what was essentially a theatrical nonevent...
...Fewer still are deep thinkers...
...It wasn't good journalism...
...But almost all of them, it seems, erred grievously, or falsified their stories...
...The author depends primarily on the word of a handful of often unreliable informants...
...Reading about incident upon incident, however, one eventually begins to wonder whether correspondents could, under any conceivable conditions, write with the awareness and dispassion Knightley seems to expect from them...
...In fact, many, if not most, are petty backbiters, nonreaders, fourth-rate Writers—a collection of quirky mediocrities subject to every type of influence and pressure...
...In World War I, only Americans reported with much perception, until the British propaganda machine won them over by the usual blandishments of escorted tours, dinners and briefings...
...And he quotes at random from dispatches and news items without attempting any serious day-by-day or week-by-week analysis of the coverage of any major publication...
...His account of the dashing William Howard Russell, the London Times' Crimea correspondent, is fascinating...
...12.95...
...Young Winston Churchill, lusting for glory and power, doubling as a journalist and a soldier, urged "with earnestness an unflinching and uncompromising prosecution of the war...
...Coverage during World War II was no better...
...They watch, they criticize, they analyze, they fawn, they carp, but their perspective is much too close to offer any kind of accurate overview...
...Ironically, Knightley, who condemns reporters for "selective objectivity," is guilty of the very same thing, picking incidents and quotations that suit his theme and disregarding evidence to the contrary...
...American newspapers, for the most part, neglected the greatest single news event of this century, the Russian Revolution...
...In the end, Knightley shows little understanding of the actual role of the reporter...
...newspapermen, Knightley remarks, "made Guernica...
...This is clearest in his final chapters, on Vietnam...
...Yet their excessive coverage of the Spanish Civil War was, according to Knightley, equally misleading...
...Robert Capa may have staged his famous "moment of death" photograph...
...troops arrived in France, Washington's PR machine proved no less effective at getting journalists to cooperate...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3
