When War Correspondents Take Sides

The National Interest

When War Correspondents Take Sides

Leon Hadar

September 13, 2012 - http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/when-war-correspondents-take-sides-7468

An opponent of U.S. intervention in World War I, the isolationist senator from California Hiram Johnson lamented once that, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Indeed, as British author Philip Knightley demonstrated in his The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as a Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, Johnson’s warning was right: war correspondents sometimes spread lies for governments and others with a stake in the outcome of the war.
Much of the critique of the U.S. media coverage of the Vietnam War—and more recently, of the war in Iraq—highlighted the danger of American journalists becoming either the targets of the news management by their own government or as the mouthpieces for the "other side." But portraying American journalists as victims of U.S. propaganda or as targets for manipulation by Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein misses an important point.
Many of the journalists who have been drawn to the hot zones of the globe have been driven by a notion that they have a role to play in a grand, historical epoch. Their mission, as they see it, is to draw the attention of the world to the evil being committed by the “bad guys” against helpless victims and to force their government and the international community to “do something.”