BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, with war news round the clock, it seemed time to recall the history of war reporting. Last year Brooke interviewed the acknowledged expert on the subject, historian Phillip Knightley. Here's that interview again. [MUSIC UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:In 1854 a London Times reporter named William Howard Russell became a star, as the first famous war correspondent, with this account of the British Light Cavalry Brigade against Russian gunners in Crimea.

"WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL:" At ten minutes past 11, our light cavalry brigade advanced. They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendor of war. With a halo of steel above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow's death cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries. But 'ere they were lost from view, the plain was strewn with their bodies. Through the clouds of smoke we could see their sabres flashing as they rode between the gunners as they stood. At 35 minutes past 11, not a single British soldier except the dead and the dying was left in front of the Muscovite guns.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Russell was seen as the first practitioner of a great tradition: war reporting. But when he looked back on it all, Russell called himself "the miserable parent of a luckless tribe." The reason for that gloomy assessment can be glimpsed in a remark made by U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917. He said "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Phillip Knightley is author of the classic study of the foreign correspondent, The First Casualty. It's been released in a new edition, updated for the first time since it was published 27 years ago. Phillip, welcome to the show!

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Thank you!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why, when summing up his career, did Russell call himself "the miserable parent of a luckless tribe?"

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: I think he foresaw what was going to happen to that tribe. He, he foresaw that they would become in their own way propagandists for the government of the day. The military, who didn't like war correspondents right from the beginning, didn't want Russell along covering the charge of the light brigade because it brought home to a reading public, a greatly growing reading public, the horrors of warfare!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it already began to change during Russell's career!

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:Yes. By the time that Russell was-- had finished with the Crimea and moved off to the American Civil War, the power of the press with its war reporting had brought down a government in Britain and infuriated all the generals who up until then had reported their own wars!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Brought down the government in Britain?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:Yes, it-- the reports about the inefficiency of the supply requirements of the army, about the way that soldiers were left lying untreated, wounded on the battlefield that led to Florence Nightingale going over to the Crimea in order to help these soldiers --brought down the government of the day!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well let's get past the charge of the light brigade to the American Civil War. Now the coverage there should have been extraordinary! Suddenly reporters had access to this astounding new communications technology --the telegraph. But you write that it was covered miserably!

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Yes, because already we can sense a certain corruption creeping in to the way reporters reported. They began to realize their power. They began to charge various officers sums of money to give them "a puff in the press," as they said.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But was that all? Was it simply that the reporters were after personal gain or was there the politics of nations getting in the way of truth? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Well a lot was beginning to creep in. Politicians began to realize that nations fight as its people think, and that you can manipulate the way people think in wartime by clever manipulation of the war correspondents themselves.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the twin forces of propaganda and censorship acquired a very modern efficiency during the First World War. Could you set the scene?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: The scene was that the military by now, alarmed in the latter part of the 19th Century at the power that war correspondents were displaying, revolted against having war correspondents around at all, and they-- they announced that, with the British Expeditionary Force to France to fight Germany, they would allow only five war correspondents, and they sort of incorporated them into the Army! They said you can come if you can ride a horse and that you will be given all the status of, say, a captain and that you will have a batman and a driver and a personal censor, and we will show you what we think you should see. So you'd got none of the horrors of the First World War. You got none of the slaughter of the trenches. So you said it's been a glorious day for Britain today when in fact something like a hundred thousand people, a hundred thousand soldiers had been killed in, in one battle alone!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now that was a war when reporters signed on to the cause -- they were committed to the allied victory. But during the Spanish Civil War there was a division between governments and among the press over who was right! There was no objectivity. There wasn't any middle ground. And most of the reporters sided with the Republicans.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: They saw the fight there, the Republican Government against the insurgents led by Fascist general General Franco, as being the beginnings of what later on became the Second World War! [MUSIC]

NARRATOR:Rumbling eastward this week from Aragon toward the sea is the mightiest offensive since the World War as the mechanized army of Spanish rebel General Francisco Franco. Tanks from the great German firm of Krupp, bombers from Italy's Caproni, Italian armored trucks, German heavy artillery -- a crushing juggernaut that blasts its way through every Loyalist defense on toward the Loyalist industrial center and seaport of Barcelona.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: They saw the great battle developing between Democracy and Fascism and felt that the Spanish Republican Army deserved to win!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And with the stakes so high, the "first-casualty-is-truth" principle kicked in with a vengeance, and the reporters actively slanted their stories. They even made things up --both the pro-Republicans and the pro-Fascists!

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Yes. I mean I can give you a good example of making things up: the denial of the bombing of Guernica. This was a bombing carried out by German planes working, fighting with the Franco Fascists.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Immortalized in the Picasso painting.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:Indeed. There was a concerted move by the propagandists for the Franco side to make certain that the public got the view that this was an entirely invented story by pro-Republican reporters and that what really happened there was simply that the people of Guernica had destroyed the town themselves in order to blame the German bombers for what had occurred.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:On the pro-Republican side you spend a fair amount of time on the journalist Claude Cockburn who was a fine writer, but you saw his Spanish War coverage as a disaster.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: He admits himself that on one occasion he sat down with a comintern officer and a map of a town so as to make certain that they got the details right, and they totally invented a battle which was won by the government Republican Army against the hordes of fascists who had been storming them. He became so attached to what he felt was the right side that he lied in order to put that side in the best possible light.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You quote him telling his wife with regard to the public's right to the truth. He said "Who gave such a right? Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government and the Fascists are beaten in Spain, they will have such a right. This isn't an abstract question. It's a shocking war."

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Yes. That, that sums up very well the way he felt about it! Later on other correspondents have said that they feel that the public right to know and the public right to objective or fair reporting can come back when the war is over, but in the meantime it's necessary to win the war.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the coverage of World War II -- the "good war" -- from the standpoint of journalism was it as good as all that?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:No! I mean I quote at the end of that chapter a Canadian war correspondent who'd been working for one of the big news agencies as saying, looking back after the war was over, "he was appalled at what he'd written," and he said "we weren't even - we weren't reporters; we weren't even historians; we were just propagandists for the Western side." That-- But, you see, the-- In a war of national survival, it's very easy to get the journalists on-side. You don't want to be accused of doing anything that might inhibit your government from winning what you and they consider to be a just war! [SOUND OF AIRPLANES UP & UNDER]

NARRATOR:Departing almost to a split second on the right time on a plan which they've been working and sweating and slaving at for months. The sky now is full of the noise of these paratroop planes as they circle the aerodrome before they take their course. But just as they're circling in the air, so the others that are waiting to go are circling the track of the aerodromes, their lights moving round in a stately, steady procession. Aboard them are some of the toughest and finest and bravest men that we have in Britain, and they go out today to face their greatest trial.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: At least the Germans avoided the hypocrisy of the allied side where the Allies pretended that these war correspondents were writing the truth and writing impartial reports and fair reports. The Germans simply herded all the war correspondents into a, a semi-army unit called the propaganda company and told them what to write!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's jump ahead to Vietnam. Now that was the first time when reporters were actually accused of helping to hand victory to the enemy. Did they?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: The American military certainly believed that's the case. I don't know what aberration occurred in the military mind in the, in the Pentagon in-- during the Vietnam War, but some aberration did occur, because they decided they would trust the war correspondents to be on-side. I mean they'd been on side to a large extent in Korea, and they thought they would enjoy the same support from the press as they'd enjoyed there. So they just handed them on a platter a card that said you can go anywhere you want. We will help you get there. We will provide you with rations when you are there, and you can write anything you like. But we'll rely on you and your good sense and your pat--as your patriotic duty to write the story as you see it. Well, it worked for a while, because most American war correspondents there did feel that the war was a just one, but they began to object to the way in which the war was being waged.

CORRESPONDENT:The long, wearying and oftentimes baffling war against Communist rebels in South Vietnam swung sharply toward a new crisis today. For the first time in the year's long struggle, the scene of action has shifted from the jungles and rice paddies to the sea and involved naval craft instead of guerilla fighters. Hard on the heels of an attack Sunday, and in the face of a warning from Washington, North Vietnamese torpedo boats opened an attack on two United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin today.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: The public back in the United States learned the full truth about body counts and they learned the truth about assassination squads and they learned the truth about the deaths of innocent people; they learned the truth about various American atrocities, and this be--this so sickened the viewer and the reader that they lost the will to continue the war!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: War reporting changed after Vietnam, didn't it.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:Yes, it changed amazingly. For the worse. [LAUGHS] What happened was that military chiefs all over the world looked at Vietnam and thought what lessons can we learn from this? And at a conference held in the Royal United Services Institute in London in 1975, I think it was, attended by representatives of the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense here and a number of senior journalists, the question of can we ever again allow color television cameras or any television cameras on the battlefield again and to cover a war no matter how just that war might be? And the conclusion was a resounding no! So from that moment on, the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense worked on a plan to manage the media in wartime! And it turned out to be a very simple but very effective plan. The military now controls access to the war, and nobody is allowed there unless the military takes you or allows you to go.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Grenada, Panama--

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Yeah. Haiti-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- and, and The Gulf--

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: -- and The Gulf!

CORRESPONDENT:We've been receiving some late reports from Baghdad that it appears airports and military installations near the Iraqi capital have been hit. What, what do you say about that?

MAN: This strikes me as an orderly way of shutting a country down. We are making war at all of Saddam's most important war-making capacities. The one thing I am not hearing is that we are not apparently making war on the innocent civilians.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You called the Gulf War the, the "Video Game War." That's because so much of what we remember of that coverage are the reporters sitting in the briefing room being regaled with pictures of smart bombs that turned out in retrospect to have been--?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Less smart than we think. Yes. The military made it very difficult for re--war reporters to get to the front to see what was happening! They were taken on little conducted tours with the pool system which all journalists hate --pool system being a group of reporters that are selected or self-selected -- and they are required to report for the whole of the media. And they're taken--they're conducted where the military thinks it's safe to let them go, and they're censored. The major American media organizations objected to this and considered bringing an action while the war was on, claiming that this infringed their right of freedom of expression. But then their own rivalry with--among themselves led to the abandonment of that and only The Nation continued it, and by the time that the, they would have got a decision, the war was over. But the judge did rule that there was a case to answer!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well what about the coverage of Kosovo? There was plenty of reporting there that didn't suit government policy. There were some on-the-scene accounts. Was that finally good, unimpeded reporting?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Well the-- [SIGHS] the-- We're getting into a real minefield here about what is "good, unimpeded reporting." Before the reporters got there, the government justification for what the--what was happening had so demonized the Serbs that it became very difficult for any reporter not to join the mainstream stories of Serb atrocities. A lot of the war correspondents, mostly young and inexperienced -- the quick story to do was "I witnessed an atrocity today" or "I've, I'm -have discovered another mass grave." And they were known among the various independent interpreters there as "the mass-graves correspondents." It's quite possible in wartime to say "Well, we're being showered, inundated with material, but very little real information." You had to look around for a--an old Balkans hand who understood the centuries of animosity that led to what had occurred, and follow him or her in order to get a, a real idea of what was occurring.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Your book is studded with stories of, of lucky and courageous correspondents who found themselves in the right place at the right time and managed to get the story through. And a lot of what stood in their way was simply the technology of the era. We have myriad ways to get words from one continent to another and out in front of the public. Shouldn't it be easier now to evade the kinds of obstructions that governments put in front of war reporting?

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: You mean satellite phones and position --navigational positioning devices and all that sort of thing -- make it much, much easier to get the story back, but what is the story? It is not difficult to manage the media in wartime. You provide them with almost unlimited information, but information that you want to get published. And you denigrate and slander any correspondent, like for example Peter Arnett who attempts to--who attempted to report the war from the other side by staying on in Baghdad. Arnett was accused of being a traitor.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Phillip, I must say this has all been very reassuring. [LAUGHTER]

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY:Well I'm -- I know [LAUGHS] it's not very reassuring, but maybe we'll win through! But I, I, I'm afraid I'm a pessimist about the future of being war correspondents unless there is some major change in the way that governments and the military view them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thanks very much.

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: A pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Phillip Knightley is the author of First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Kosovo, now in an updated edition. He spoke to us last year from the BBC in London. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Megan Ryan with Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe and Rob Christiansen, and edited--by Brooke. We had help from Sharon Ball and Brian Tilley. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC]