WAR CORRESPONDENT

A 'war correspondent' is a journalist who covers stories firsthand from a war zone.

Contents

Methods

History

Notable war correspondents

See also

External links

Methods

Their jobs require war correspondents to deliberately go to the most conflict-ridden parts of the world. Once there they attempt to get close enough to the action to provide written accounts, photos, or film footage. Thus, being a war correspondent is often considered the most dangerous form of journalism. On the other hand, war coverage is also one of the most successful branches of journalism. Newspaper sales increase greatly in wartime and television news ratings go up. News organizations have sometimes been accused of warmongering because of the advantages they gather from conflict. William Randolph Hearst is often said to have encouraged the Spanish-American War for this reason. (See Yellow journalism)
Only some conflicts receive extensive worldwide coverage, however. Among recent wars, the Kosovo War received a great deal of coverage, as did the Gulf War. Many third-world wars, however, tend to received less substantial coverage because global audiences are often less interested and the conflicts are also far more dangerous for war correspondents.

History

Written war correspondents have existed as long as journalism. Before modern journalism it was more common for longer histories to be written at the end of a conflict. The first known of these is Herodotus's account of the Persian Wars, however he did not himself participate in the events. Thucydides, who some years later wrote a history of the Peloponnesian Wars was an observer to the events he described.
The first modern war correspondent is said to be Dutch painter Willem van de Velde, who in 1653 took to sea in a small boat to observe a naval battle between the Dutch and the English, of which he made many sketches on the spot, which he later developed into one big drawing that he added to a report he wrote to the States General. A further modernisation came with the development of newspapers and magazines . One of the earliest war correspondents was Henry Crabb Robinson, who covered Napoleon's campaigns in Spain and Germany for ''The Times'' of London. William Howard Russell who covered the Crimean War, also for ''The Times'', is often described as the first modern war correspondent. The stories from this era, which were almost as lengthy and analytical as early books on war, took many weeks from being written to being published.
It was not until the telegraph was developed that reports could be sent on a daily basis and events could be reported as they occurred that the short mainly descriptive stories of today became common. The continued progress of technology has allowed live coverage of events via satellite uplinks. The rise of twenty-four hour news channels has led to a heightened demand for coverage.
Early film and television news rarely had war correspondents. Rather they would simply collect footage provided by other sources, often the government, and the news anchor would then add narration. This footage was often staged as cameras were large and bulky. This changed dramatically with the Vietnam War when networks from around the world sent cameramen with portable cameras and correspondents. This proved damaging to the United States as the full brutality of war became a daily feature on the nightly news.

Notable war correspondents

Some of them became authors of fiction drawing on their war experiences, including Davis, Crane and Hemingway.

★ Kate Adie (born 1945); covered the Gulf War, Yugoslav Wars, Rwandan Genocide and the Sierra Leone Civil War.

★ Christiane Amanpour (born 1958); covered the Gulf War and the Bosnian War.

★ Peter Arnett (born 1934); covered the Vietnam War, 1991 Gulf War, the 2001 Invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War. He is known for covering news from the "other side" of the battlefield.

★ Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881-1931); covered the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.

★ Robert King Beach; covered the Spanish-American War.

★ Martin Bell (born 1938); covered the Vietnam War, Biafra War, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Angolan Civil War and the Bosnian War.

★ Mary Marvin Breckinridge (1905-2002); covered World War II.

★ Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983); covered the Pacific War, Korean War and Vietnam War. He was known for covering news from the "other side" of the battlefield, and was often critisized of being a communist sympathiser.

★ Robert Capa (1913-1954); covered the Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, the European Theatre of World War II and the First Indochina War (where he was killed by a landmine).

★ Dickey Chapelle (1918-1965); covered the Pacific War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Vietnam War (where she was killed by a landmine). She was the first female US war correspondent to be killed in action.

★ Winston Churchill (1874-1965); covered the Siege of Malakand, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War.

★ Basil Clarke (1879-1947); covered the fighting on the Western Front during WWI.

★ Stephen Crane (1871-1900); covered the 1897 Greco-Turkish War, where he contracted tuberculosis.

★ Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916); covered the Spanish-American War, Second Boer War and the fighting on the Macedonian front during WWI.

★ Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965); covered World War II.

★ Gloria Emerson (1929-2004); covered the Vietnam War.

★ Richard Engel; covered the Iraq War and the 2006 Lebanon War.

★ Bernard B. Fall (1926-1967); covered the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War (where he was killed by a landmine).

★ Robert Fisk (born 1946); covered the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Algerian Civil War, Kosovo War and the 2003 Iraq War.

★ Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998); covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam War, the Six-Day War and even the U.S. invasion of Panama.

★ Georgie Anne Geyer (born 1935); covered the Guatemalan Civil War and the Algerian Civil War.

★ Louis Grondijs (1878-1961); covered World War I, the Russian Civil War, the Invasion of Manchuria and the Spanish Civil War.

★ Al Gore (born 1948); covered the Vietnam War.

★ David Halberstam

★ Macdonald Hastings

★ Max Hastings

★ Ernest Hemingway

★ Michael Herr;

★ Marguerite Higgins; paved the way for female war correspondents.

★ Peggy Hull

★ Ryszard Kapuściński

★ Helen Kirkpatrick

★ Terry Lloyd

★ Lara Logan

★ Anthony Loyd

★ Anne O'Hare McCormick

★ Alan Moorehead

★ Edward R. Murrow

★ Arturo Pérez-Reverte, worked for Pueblo and Spanish TVE. Covered the Bosnian War among others.

★ John Pilger

★ Anna Politkovskaya

★ Ernie Pyle

★ Dan Rather

★ Joe Rosenthal, received the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

★ William Howard Russell

★ John Sack

★ Morley Safer

★ Sydney Schanberg, his experiences in Cambodia during the Vietnam War are dramatized in ''The Killing Fields''

★ Kurt Schork

★ Sigrid Schultz

★ Sylvester "Harry" Scovell

★ Giuliana Sgrena

★ John Simpson

★ Kevin Sites

★ Benjamin C. Truman

★ Kate Webb

★ Eric Lloyd Williams

★ Chester Wilmot

★ Jean-Paul Ney

See also

★ Embedded journalist

★ Press pool

External links

★ An investigation into war reporting

★ War Reporter.info

★ War Correspondents: A Book Bibliography

★ A statistical analysis of journalists killed in Iraq since hostilities began in March 2003