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Abstract
Drawing on a study of the journalism, literature and autobiographies of war correspondents, this article examines some of the problems of historical research in the field of journalism studies. These include the difficulties of identifying the journalist in history; the methodological obstacles that confront the researcher in analysing historical journalistic texts and the challenge of distinguishing and understanding the pressures under which different types of journalistic texts have been produced. It is argued that the historiography of journalism is limited by ‘media centric’ approaches and that fictional representation and factual accounts are equally important to understanding the practice and performance of journalism.
Notes
1. To be published by Routledge under the title War Reporting: Past, Present and Future.
2. John Snow is the news anchor for the main evening news bulletin on Britain's Channel Four which is produced by ITN.
3. Some journalists have made the transition to academia—Peter Hennessy, formerly of The Times is now Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary's London. He has written many distinguished accounts of post-war British history. Max Hastings has combined a career as a journalist and editor with that of a well-known military historian. TV reporter David Halberstam wrote award winning histories of the Vietnam War and CBS News, his former employer. Anne Applebaum has worked for several major international news publications including covering Eastern Europe for The Economist as well having written the award winning history of the Gulags.
4. For example, see Knight Hunt, Fox Bourne, and Hatton. Knight Hunt edited the Medical Times and worked for the Daily News in the 1830s and 1840s; Fox Bourne edited the Weekly Dispatch 1876–1887 and Hatton edited The Sunday Times 1874–1881.
5. See Boston, F. Williams, and Greenslade. Other practitioners making noteworthy contributions include Jenkins, A Market; Newspapers; Horrie, Engel, and Marr.
6. The first press release is often attributed to Ivy Lee who in 1906 wrote up and issued an account of a rail accident in New Jersey for the company involved which was reproduced verbatim in the New York Times. Official dispatches have a longer history and served a different purpose, providing the commander-in-chief's account of battles and campaigns. Press briefings can be traced back on an occasional basis to the 1870s when during the Franco-Prussian War the German chancellor Bismarck briefed selected journalists. However, the systematic use of releases, news conferences and press officers developed during the First World War. The News Department of the Foreign Office set up in 1914 played a crucial role. See Sanders and Taylor.
7. Complaints by war correspondents about the technological barriers to their ability to cover the story have appeared in every era. Today they continue; according to Kate Adie ‘increasingly hacks are tethered to the satellite dish always on hand to deliver the “live spot” in a curious belief that rabbiting on live is a more relevant and informed kind of reporting: in reality, someone stuck next to a dish for hours on end is the last creature on earth to have learned anything new, and probably unaware of a corpse 20 yards away’ (Kindness 415).
8. Kapuściński is critical of the limitations of what he called ‘straightforward journalism’, that is the cabled stories he sent back to his home office in Poland:
I was always left with the feeling of inadequacy. I had only covered the political event, and not really conveyed the deeper, and I felt, truer nature of what was going on … The second version is what I write later, and that expresses what I actually felt, what I lived through, the reflections surrounding the simple news story. (quoted in Aucoin 12)
9. There has been very little discussion of the problems of doing historical content analysis such as coding and categorising over time, see Berridge.
10. For a fuller and more informative discussion of the digital impact on historical research see Hampshire and Johnson, and Bingham.
11. See for example, Shafer, Wainaina for critical commentaries. Debates around the nature of Kapuściński's reporting have at their essence the relationship between journalism and literature. Neal Ascherson draws attention to the distinction between the ‘English-language’ tradition which holds that selling readers fiction dressed up as fact is always wrong and what he describes as the Central European tradition which plays around with the reality in order to convey more vividly ‘what it was like to be there’ for readers. He notes that all journalists are sometimes tempted to heighten their prose or sharpen up quotes by dropping the boring bits. The charge against Kapuściński is that he overstepped the mark by selling ‘faction’ as fact. See Ascherson.
12. See Price, Hanigen, Pilger Heroes, and Bell Through Gates.
13. Other themes that can be identified as driving the narrative of these accounts include—bearing witness, the reality of war, personal angst, side by side with soldiers, competition, getting the story, blow by blow accounts of my war, struggles with technology, anti-war, war addiction, struggling against the powers that be.
14. The focus on heroism and adventure that was used to promote the works of war reporters in the nineteenth century can be contrasted today with a focus on the correspondents’ fascination or obsession with war (see Steele; Loyd) or their ‘failings’ as a reporter (see Emcke; Ayres).
15. In 2003 during the invasion of Iraq nearly 600 journalists were ‘embedded’ with US military units. Journalists have been attached to military unites and donned military uniform since the nineteenth century, most notably during the First World War when awarded the rank of captain they found themselves escorted around the battlefield. However, in 2003 they were billeted with the troops, ate and lived with them, enduring the same hardships including coming under fire. For an assessment of the policy of embedding see Paul and Kim.
16. See, for example, Thussu, Griffin, Askoy and Robins.
17. This unparalleled access to the ordinary soldier has to be seen in the context of the restrictions placed on what could be reported as well as the personal bond between reporter and soldier.
18. See Carruthers 4. Correspondents praise the novel: according to Edward Behr (vii) it is ‘the best book ever written about the press and the only one to capture the quintessential absurdity of our calling’. It is also worth noting that while Scoop has remained in print since it was first published in 1936, Waugh's factual account of his time in Abyssinia reporting for the Daily Mail is little acknowledged and has been mostly out of print (Waugh).
19. David Welch draws attention to an upsurge in the memoirs published by war correspondents in recent times. He states that ‘there can be little doubt that in recent conflicts, war correspondents have acted not simply as conduits of information but as personalities in their own right. It has become de rigueur for correspondents to publish their memoirs of war’. He proceeds to discuss the correlation between the ‘celebration of the correspondent’ and the ‘dumbing-down’ of the reporting from war zones. The implication is that autobiographical accounts by those who report wars, and the cult of personality surrounding the war correspondent, are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nothing could be less true. War tales told by those who cover war have been sought after publishing coups since the nineteenth century and many have been best sellers.
20. See for example, Backschneider, Feldstein, and Tuchman.