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Murray Polner reviews Philip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero & Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (3d ed.; Johns Hopkins, 2004)

Mr. Polner, an army veteran, is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-author of Disarmed and Dangerous, a dual biography of the Berrigan brothers. He is the book review editor of trade books for HNN.

This 1975 book, now in its third edition, remains the single most perceptive treatment of journalism in times of war and conflict. That long forgotten progressive senator from California, Hiram Johnson, put it perfectly during World War I: “The first casualty when war comes, is truth.” Hence Knightley’s book's apt title.

In his first edition, Knightley concluded that from Crimean War onward, war correspondents (and other journalists) had “omitted or twisted” their reportage because far too many of them believed that critical reporting or exposing governmental lies would render them unpatriotic or even worse.

During the Gulf War, lies were accepted as facts, such as the unquestioned but widely accepted fabrication that the Patriot had destroyed SCUD missiles or the very popular whopper produced by an influential public relations firm that Saddam was killing incubator babies.

Before invasion of Iraq, it is hard to find mainstream correspondents in the press or on TV critical of the myth of Saddam’s WMDs or his nonexistent ties to 9/11. Nor were many curious about a postwar Iraq, or even challenge the ideological dogmatism and bellicosity of Washington’s well-financed neoconservative clan who insisted the war would be a "cakewalk" which would trigger the growth of democracy throughout the Middle East. With very few honorable exceptions, virtually every syndicated pundit, newspaper, TV and cable station supported the rush to war. If Fox-TV regularly echoed the White House’s propaganda line, so did more “objective” mainstream media. They had “wrapped themselves in the flag,” the BBC’s Richard Sambrook told a Columbia “J” school audience.

The staged toppling of Saddam’s statue was accepted as fact as was the Jessica Lynch fable. The media also accepted without much public outcry the government’s lame excuse for refusing to permit photographs of returning coffins of American dead. (To its credit, the New York Times regularly prints their names.) The vast number of Iraqi civilians killed during the war is rarely if ever mentioned. Then, too, the managed concept of “embedded” war correspondents was and remains a way to eliminate independent news reporting from the front. “I was able to find only two instances of embedded correspondents who reported critically on the behavior of U.S. troops they were embedded with and which went against the official account of what had occurred,” says Knightley.

It wasn’t until the occupation turned sour that American journalists and columnists-–but to far lesser degree, TV and cable-—felt brave enough to examine more honestly what was being done in their country’s name. Still, as Michael Massing astutely reported in the New York Review of Books, what had preceded it was too often a shameful period of bad reporting, chauvinism and conformism.

The Vietnam War policy of allowing correspondents and photographers to wander freely during the fighting and report and catch on camera what they saw and not what they were told to say, rightly notes Knightley, “was an aberration. The freedom given to correspondents there to go anywhere, see everything, and write what they liked, is not going to be given again.”

The era of war correspondent as hero is over, predicts Knightley. In the future, their editors and publishers will have to decide if they are to serve as cheerleaders and "mythmakers" subservient to an all-powerful state. 0r, perhaps we’ll have to rely more on the Internet and bloggers, however flawed some may be, as they dig out facts the government wishes to conceal and which may help the rest of us recognize sophisticated efforts to manipulate public opinion. It won’t be easy.