The First Casualty

Fülszöveg

THE FIRST CASUALTY
From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Oorrespondent as Hero, Propagandista and Myth Maker
PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY
The war correspondent is comparatively new to bistory. Generals preferred to report their own vic-tories and resented a civilian snooping around the battlefield, as William Howard Russell of The Times of London quickly discovered in the Crimea. But the hunger for news in the American Civil War changed that, and soon the correspondent—gold in one pocket and pistoi in the other—was setting off for wars all over the world. By 1914-18, when a rotting corpse on barbed wire became a symbol of a world gone mad, the war correspondent was so much a part of the military machine that he kept quiet about the extent of the slaughter until the war was over. Not until Vietnam did the war correspondent begin to emerge as a partisan for truth and compassion—and then the struggle became bittér and frequently unrewarding.
In war-time the correspondent is the people's main... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE FIRST CASUALTY
From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Oorrespondent as Hero, Propagandista and Myth Maker
PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY
The war correspondent is comparatively new to bistory. Generals preferred to report their own vic-tories and resented a civilian snooping around the battlefield, as William Howard Russell of The Times of London quickly discovered in the Crimea. But the hunger for news in the American Civil War changed that, and soon the correspondent—gold in one pocket and pistoi in the other—was setting off for wars all over the world. By 1914-18, when a rotting corpse on barbed wire became a symbol of a world gone mad, the war correspondent was so much a part of the military machine that he kept quiet about the extent of the slaughter until the war was over. Not until Vietnam did the war correspondent begin to emerge as a partisan for truth and compassion—and then the struggle became bittér and frequently unrewarding.
In war-time the correspondent is the people's main source of news. How good a source is he? The First Casualty looks critically at the major wars of the past 120 years, tries to distinguish fact from myth, and examines to what extent the war correspondent has been responsible for myths. The author has not confined himself to Britain and the United States; Germán, Japanese, Russian, French. and Italian correspondents, and the systems for controlling them, are all described and assessed.
The conclusions are startiing. How did two of the world's leading newspapers, The Times of London and the New York Times, get the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Allied intervention all wrong? Could American coverage of the war with Japan have been no better than the Japanese? Who reported Pearl Harbor as an American vic-tory? Were the Germans right about the bombing of Coventry? Were there battles in the Second World War about which Axis correspondents told the truth and Allied correspondents lied? Why was the most important story in Vietnam broken not by a war correspondent but by a reporter back in the United States? Vissza