The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo

by Phillip Knightley

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"The first casualty when war comes, is truth," said American Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917, and in his history of war journalism, Phillip Knightley shows just how right Johnson was. From William Howard Russell, who described the appalling conditions of the Crimean War in "The Times", to the ranks of reporters, photographers, and cameramen who captured the realities of war in Vietnam, the book tells a story of heroism and collusion, censorship and suppression, myth-making and propaganda. Since Vietnam, Knightley finds, governments have become much more adept at managing the media, and in new chapters on the Falklands, the Gulf War and the former Yugoslavia, he concludes that the war correspondent's role as a seeker of truth is now in jeopardy.
  • ISBN10 080186951X
  • ISBN13 9780801869518
  • Publish Date 1 May 2002 (first published 9 October 1975)
  • Publish Status Out of Stock
  • Out of Print 11 December 2007
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Format Paperback
  • Pages 592
  • Language English