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The first casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam : the war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth maker
The first casualty From the Crimea to Vietnam the war correspondent as hero propagandist and myth maker Author:Phillip Knightley The war correspondent is comparatively new to history. Generals preferred to report their own victories 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 on... more »e pocket and pistol in the other - was setting off for wars all over the world. By 1914-18 when a rotting corpse on barbed wire became the 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 bitter 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; German, Japanese, Russian, French, and Italian correspondents, and the systems for controlling them are all described and assessed.
The First Casualty is a disturbing book because it suggests that our attitudes to history are moulded by what we read in war-time and that what we read too often bears lettle resemblance to reality.« less