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Philip Knightly, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent As Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) Revised edition published in paperback in 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press "The first casualty when war comes, is truth," said Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917. So begins Phillip Knightley's revolutionary telling of the history of war journalism, from the Crimean War up through the 1999 war in Kosovo. For each conflict, Knightly hones in on the reporters who dominated the coverage of the day, looking beyond their impact on the public's perception to a more thoughtful examination of the forces that shaped them. From political pressures to the emotional investments of the writers themselves, Knightley gives us an intimate view into the enormity of the task faced by war correspondents in their varying attempts to overcome censorship, hardship, and their own bias in order to bring war back from the front lines to the front pages. While Knightley's now-classic chronicle of war journalism is heavily colored by his emphasis on the role that political pressures have played, he periodically pauses from his own drumbeat to consider the deeper sociological issues. "What are war correspondents for? What is expected of them? Who still believes them?" he asks. They are questions whose very relevance has been challenged, Knightley cynically concludes, by a public that likely no longer desires "the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide." While The First Casualty spins a conspiracy-filled tale of media-military relations over 150 years of conflict, it is no less of a bible for media critics and would-be correspondents in its richly textured telling of the history of war journalism. When it was first published in 1975, The First Casualty earned Knightley the Overseas Press Club of America Award for the Best Book on Foreign Affairs. The timing of the book's publication was not an insignificant factor in its tremendous reception. Through the release of the Pentagon Papers, the public had become painfully and acutely aware of the government's attempts to manipulate the press, and the military machine was still smarting from its loss "not on the battlefield but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen." The New York Times observed that The First Casualty "may make us all a little more free to talk about and find the truth." The Columbia Journalism Review calls the updated edition of the book, which now includes the conflicts in the Falklands, the Persian Gulf, and Kosovo, "a durable and unblinking chronicle of the role of correspondents in covering, analyzing, and sometimes promoting war." While not a war correspondent himself, Knightley is nevertheless a well-respected and award-winning investigative journalist who worked twenty years for The Sunday Times of London. MORE: Review by NYU’s director of magazine journalism, Robert Boynton Collection of essays on the relationship between media and the military from a variety of perspectives March 4, 2003, Interview with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Bryan Whitman by Dick Gordon of The Connection, NPR on war reporting A legal interpretation of free speech in times of war, “The First Amendment on the Battlefield” by David A. Frenznick |
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