War Reporting

James Agee, Jack Belden, Walter Bernstein, Bill Davidson, Vincent Tubbs, Margaret Bourke-White, Ernie Pyle, J. Saunders Redding, Robert St. John, Sigrid Schultz, William L. Shirer, Howard K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, C.L. Sulzberger, Larry Lesueur, A.J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow.

James Agee, Jack Belden, Walter Bernstein, Bill Davidson, Vincent Tubbs, Margaret Bourke-White, Ernie Pyle, J. Saunders Redding, Robert St. John, Sigrid Schultz, William L. Shirer, Howard K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, C.L. Sulzberger, Larry Lesueur, A.J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow.

Some you know, some you don’t. All – and more – were war reporters during World War II. Davidson wrote, “Rommel, Count Your Men” about a howitzer battalion at the siege of St. Malo in August 1944. Miller wrote, “U.S.A. Tent Hospital” about the wounded in Normandy in July 1944. Pyle and Liebling covered D-Day while it was happening – where it was happening.

They brought the battles home to the American public and provided a first-hand understanding of what our soldiers were facing and how they were doing. They covered strategy, tactics and morale. Most important, they provided context for the home front.

Today, readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times (as representative of the press) think the war is between Congress and the White House. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid vs. President Bush. Republican defections vs. Democratic posturing. To be fair, there is reportage from Iraq – readers get extensive coverage of every car bomb, every political failure of the Iraqi government and every message from al Qaeda. Coverage of American soldiers, however, is largely limited to inadvertent killings of local civilians, obituaries and PTSD. Coverage of the battlefield is nonexistent.

Polls reflect that the American public wants our troops out of Iraq. What else could it want if it doesn’t know what our military presence does or what the military experts think would happen if we left with the job unfinished?

Part of this may be a media reaction to the 2003 “embed.” Having reporters travel, eat, sleep and in some cases fight with the troops created a bond some cynics believe led to reporting that was too sympathetic to the troops and too supportive of the policies of the President who – with the active acquiescence of the House and Senate – sent them to battle. Too favorable to the war effort.

The press should never be a cheering section for the President or any set of policies. But if the job of the press is to inform the public of the great issues of the day, it must cover those issues from the angles that matter most. The nature of the battlefield, the military strategy and tactics that form it, and the capabilities and morale of the soldiers who fight and die on it are the angles of this war that are conspicuously missing.

It is hard to imagine anyone calling Ernie Pyle “too favorable” to war, or Vincent Tubbs too sympathetic to the troops, or William Shirer too supportive of the President. Their objectivity as well as their intrepidity made them great. It simply cannot be that America at war has no great journalists willing to go to war to bring the stories home.
Can it?