Walker’s Reviews > The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth-Maker > Status Update

Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
By Drew Middleton's definition, this personal involvement made the war correspondents unable to fulfill their duty because they had lost their objectivity. Matthews's provision for open, honest bias so long as the reader was still given the facts did not work out any better. ... [reporting] failed its readers ... did not give them "competent, balanced, complete journalistic [picture].

Italy's War against Abyssinia 1935-1936 - "What Matthews was up against ... was that the truth, that the Abyssianians stood no chance against the Italians' mechanized army, was unpalatable; sympathy suspended the reader's critical judgment, and he preferred optimistic but fake reports from Abyssinia to the more factual reports with the Italian army." (Page 179)

Sounds like a lot of reporting today, doesn't it?

This goes through various wars and the details of how some correspondents just made up stories that never happened and how censorship was used by governments to propagandize the reports. This book is very detailed and documented. It covers American, British, and European reporting of conflicts throughout the world. It covers the Crimean war, Civil War, Boer, Russo-Japanese, Greco-Turkish. Just finished WWI. Wow.

The title of this book comes from a quote in 1917 of Senator Hiram Johnson, "The first casualty when war comes is truth." This starts with reporting of the Crimean war, 1854 - 1856 with the "first war correspondent", William Howard Russell. While the actual first was probably G. L. Gruneisen, Russel's work was the first organized effort to report war news to the civilian population. Very interesting book.