Talk:War correspondent

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I added Ernie Pyle's link because he's easily the most famous World War II war correspondent and I couldn't believe he wasn't on the list.

Removed Foreign Correspondant link

I removed the Foreign Correspondant link, since it redirects to Journalist anyway (which is already at the top of the article).

Arekku 9 July 2005 00:15 (UTC)

I find this whole article to be shallow and lacking in understanding the history of journalism in relation to covering war. There are a few facts thrown in with a lot of opinion, misinformation (re: Vietnam) and biased judgements (re: prima donnas). This is Wikipedia at its worst.

Removed text

This article is in very bad shape. I agree with the gist of the above comment. I've added citation tags and removed the following section below as being unsourced, biased, and original research (as well as potentially offensive without sourced justification - the "primadonna" stuff and so one.. If someone wants to use it as a very basic starting point for writing sourced, neutral, and encyclopedic content, fine - though I would stress that this article should not be used as a soapbox against the recent US activities. It's supposed to be an article covering the subject of war journalism in general - internationally, historically etc. Bwithh 10:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

==Recent developments==

In later American wars the United States military embarked on efforts to control the media. In the Invasion of Grenada journalists were almost entirely banned. Later in the Gulf War the military found that if exciting, but sanitized, footage could be provided to the media they would use it instead of more expensive and difficult to obtain pictures from the ground. Scenes of air strikes taken from airplanes were especially popular. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq the idea of embedding journalists with troops creating close links between journalists and troops had a similar effect. The military also worked to discourage any non-embedded journalists with dire warnings that their safety could not assured and that they should withdraw. The military has also been accused of _targeting journalists in several incidents including; the shelling of the Baghdad offices of Abu Dhabi TV, a missile strike on the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, and the shelling of the Palestine Hotel. Most outlets kept reporters in Iraq along with those embedded with the troops.

Many contemporary television war correspondents increasingly tend to be prima donnas. It's often noted that they seem intent on creating an exaggerated 'rugged' appearance (ex: carefully unshaven with outdoorsy looking clothes regardless of their actual utility in the environment) and standing in the foreground of dangerous looking scenes in order to create a very inflated impression of the personal risks they are taking. Many educated viewers believe the net effect of this is a substantial amount of broadcast footage of star reporters with goatees standing in front of rubble at the expense of in depth coverage that might give the viewing public a better understanding of the actual military or political situation at hand.

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citation needed

Whatever usefulness this article has (true, not much), has been disrupted by the ubiquitous 'citation needed' tag. It might be advisable to just start over, I don't know the wiki rules, but perhaps there is a common domain encyclopedia article that can be seed for a new beginning? --Sammermpc 21:28, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Possible directions for article improvement

• It's important to mention that many war correspondents, historically, have been heavily censored. Governments are inconsistent as to what information is allowed and when, so there should be some perspective on where censorship was unusually harsh or lax. Some war correspondents are political mouthpieces for a government or a political faction. An example that comes to mind is McArthur "landing twice" on the Philippines so the cameras could get better shots of him.

• Sometimes war correspondents act as investigative journalists, but that may not be any more effective, because military organizations are often sheltered from questions they disapprove of.

• War correspondents may not be "lucky" about they see. Richard Tregaskis became hugely successful for "Guadalcanal Diary", where he was in a very important battleground, but in the Cold War era, less notable happened to him, and his books had less impact and are not well remembered. (There's a war correspondent book called "Assignment to Nowhere". Yep. Just about nothing happened.)

• A small section should mention war correspondents who caused problems, or who, one way or the other, misrepresented the situation (outside of censorship). Examples are the BBC leaking important information in the Falklands, a couple near misses in WWII, and...for example...the Pulitzer Prize winner Eddie Adams, who later felt guilty for a famous photo of a Vietnamese execution that turned out to be other than what he thought.

• Some material in the section that was deleted, about war correspondents "dirtying themselves up" to have a better camera appearance should be brought back, if there is appropriate cited material.

One way to proceed would be to quote from published works of the correspondents themselves, when they discuss their job situation.

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (talk) 04:03, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. I'll add a couple of books as a start. Testbed (talk) 10:05, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Joe the Plumber?

Joe Wurzelbacher??? Seriously??? 205.175.113.90 (talk) 18:07, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Knowledgeable editors requested for Matt Sanchez article

Some military expertise is needed to help update Fox News war correspondent Matt Sanchez article. 62.68.66.157 (talk) 22:32, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Messy

I don't have the time to finish off the clean-up myself today, but I wanted to note what a messy list this is in its organization--my guess is that it started off well and has deteriorated with time. The alphabetization is screwy, the format inconsistent item-by-item, people like Hemingway are listed as 21st century, almost nothing has a source, and there's an "Others" category that I can't quite make sense of, since most/all of the others also appear to be from the 19th-21st centuries. I've started fixing some of these problems, but it'll need a more substantial clean-up at some point. Khazar2 (talk) 17:52, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

World War II

The lack of a sub-section for World War II is a major weakness. The apparent lack of such an article in Wikipedia indicates a need for more writing. In addition to the Allied correspondents, there should be some material about correspondents of the Axis powers.
SBaker43 (talk) 22:22, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Include Nordahl Grieg?

Hi,
Nordahl Grieg reported from civil war in China and Spain, and was a war corr. in WWII:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordahl_Grieg - unless the article is for EN people only?
T 88.89.5.214 (talk) 13:21, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

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Is a journalist who is a member of a military force involved in a conflict a war correspondent?

Either way, it seems like the article should say. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 19:05, 24 October 2020 (UTC)