Extreme Danger, Censorship, Patriotism: The Heroism and Failings of Wartime Reporting

Abstract

Extreme Danger, Censorship, Patriotism:The Heroism and Failings of Wartime Reporting Giovanna Dell'Orto (bio) Chris Dubbs. American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 294 pp. $34.95. Ray Moseley. Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2017. xiii + 421 pp. $32.50. The stakes in war correspondence are literally life-or-death—both for the reporters who venture on the frontlines and for the states, nations or groups involved. That makes reporting on conflicts a perfect, if acute, case study to analyze the professional performance as well as the sociopolitical function of journalism at certain historical junctures. The study of war coverage also pries open a window into the evolving, often tense relationship between governments and journalists, testing the limits of a regime's and a society's tolerance of criticism, dissent, or simply disclosure of its policies and actions, with consequences that affect freedom of the press well after weapons cease firing. While these two new volumes focus on the two World Wars, the tensions they highlight are urgently relevant today, when objective, factual journalism finds itself in a full-blown existential crisis. Inherently full of drama, breathless adventure, and memorable characters, war reporting makes for a compelling read, which is another reason why it is one of the most fruitful veins mined by journalism historians. In fact, histories of journalism and foreign reporting in particular tend to focus disproportionately on war correspondents and correspondence. That holds true in historical surveys that zero in on "great names" to narrate the development of the profession, with an either admiring glance or blistering condemnation toward the antics of towering figures, as the titles of just a few of these classics imply—John Maxwell Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (2009); John Hohenberg's Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times (1995); Robert H. Patton, Hell Before Breakfast: America's First [End Page 91] War Correspondents Making History and Headlines, from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Far Reaches of the Ottoman Empire (2014); Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq (2004). That is also a trend in monographs about particular groups of reporters, such as African American correspondents in a largely non-diverse field (Jinx Coleman Broussard's African American Foreign Correspondents: A History, 2013), or conflicts like El Salvador's civil war (Mark Pedelty's War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents, 1995). And of course there is a prolific line of memoirs and reflections by the correspondents themselves, which by definition do not provide systematic analysis of the profession, although they give historians and the general public necessary frontline insights on pivotal conflicts such as World War II (Ed Kennedy's Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, & The Associated Press, 2012); Vietnam and Southeast Asia (notably Peter Arnett's Live from the Battlefield, 1994; Tad Bartimus et al.'s War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters who Covered Vietnam, 2002; Malcolm W. Browne's Muddy Boots and Red Socks, 1993; Richard Pyle and Horst Faas's Lost Over Laos, 2003; and Sydney Schanberg's Beyond the Killing Fields, 2010) Iraq (Arnett again; Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, 2008; and Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near, 2006). And that is only the tip of the iceberg in an abundant literature. Chris Dubbs, a military historian, and Ray Moseley, a former foreign correspondent, add to this substantial corpus with two engaging and sobering narratives about news coverage of World War I and World War II, respectively. Although very different volumes in aim and writing style, at their core they are welcome contributions to the history of war journalism, particularly in the United States, because they provide striking reminders of what has changed and what has not. At a time when the United States military continues to fight its longest war in Afghanistan while most of the public remains blissfully unaware of its existence or costs, the books...