The homepages of distinguished journalist and author Phillip Knightley
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Published in The Khaleej Times.
With the war in Afghanistan taking place in a news vacuum — when did you last read in the mainstream media a report on what is happening there — journalism academics have turned their attention to previous wars to see what lessons, if any, have been learnt.
In the current edition of [...]
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The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker is recognised as the definitive book on war reporting and war propaganda.
From William Howard Russell who blew the whistle on the appalling conditions of the British forces in the Crimea, to the correspondents who lifted the lid on the reality of the Vietnam War, through to the modern day, it is a story of heroism and manipulation, censorship and espionage.
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The Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the war against Iraq that there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: “You can write what you like – but if we don’t like it we’ll shoot you.” The figures in Iraq tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people dead, with two missing, presumed dead. If you consider how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever. This is bad enough. But – and here we tread on delicate ground – it is a fact that the largest single group of them appear to have been killed by the American military.
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Paul McGeough is a distinguished member of a fast-vanishing band of journalists, the roving foreign correspondent. Once upon a time, every newspaper had at least one. In the golden age, the ’60s and ’70s, some had four or five.
Few lasted long. The things they had seen, the drink, the corrupting influence of expense accounts and five-star hotels, the strain of a part-time marriage and the deadening feeling that history was circular and what they were writing about they had written before, pushed them into early retirement. The accountants, appalled at what they cost, made certain they were not replaced.
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On the way down to Somerset to see the famous photographer, Don McCullin, for a man-to-man chat about war, women, and the meaning of life, I recalled that the last time we had done this was in the back of a taxi on the road between Suez and Cairo. The Six Day War was about to start and our attempt to get to the likely scene of action had been thwarted by our treacherous taxi-driver. He handed us over to the Egyptian security police who sent us packing. On the long drive back we reminisced about our early days in journalism. McCullin said that his break had not been – as legend has it – The Observer photographs of a youth gang in his home suburb of Finsbury Park, north London, but of something much more in keeping with his subsequent career.
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