War Correspondents

War correspondents are a society’s window onto the battlefield. They brave the dangers at or near the front in an attempt to provide stories on who is winning, and why; on the character, strengths, and weaknesses of the main generals; and on the conditions faced by the opposing forces, their appearance, weapons, diets, and morale. The literature on war correspondents can be broadly divided into four categories. First, there are those works that focus on reporters’ output. These are often anthologies containing some of the best, or most influential, writing by one or more big names. Then there are the books that explore war correspondents’ adventures at the front. These tend to be memoir accounts by the reporters themselves, or fast-paced narratives by friendly biographers. The third set of works seeks to uncover the correspondents’ motives and modes of operations. Unlike the many soldiers who have been drafted, reporters have often had a choice: to remain in their safe hometown jobs or to head out to dangerous battle zones. Have they gone to the front simply because of the attractions of fame and fortune, or have other factors been at work: the pull of duty, the fear of being considered a shirker, the lure of comradeship? Moreover, while biographers tend to emphasize the individualistic nature of risk-seeking reporters, this third strand of writing places them in a broader context. For one thing, it looks at the relationships they forged with a military hierarchy that invariably holds a much more restrictive attitude to the whole concept of publicity. For another, it reveals the profession’s own pressures, from the acceptable norms that govern how a story is reported at a particular moment in time to the demands of editors and publishers who pay the wages. Fourth and finally come the works that assess the impact of war reporting. On the one hand, overly restrictive military censorship can cover up specific mistakes, conceal general incompetence, and, as a result, prevent a belligerent from making the necessary changes to prosecute the war more effectively. This has invariably been the journalists’ refrain. On the other hand, overly revealing news stories might give away key military secrets; they might also undermine a society’s will to fight. This is the gist of an influential strand of writing about the Vietnam War: that it was lost not on the battlefield, but on the home front. Small wonder that Vietnam looms large in the literature, as, for some, a cautionary tale of what happens when war correspondents are given too much freedom.