Originally published in 1975, The First Casualty became an instant classic by bringing alive the idea that news matters. The book attempted to describe how the news reporters report is contested, manipulated, and sometimes fabricated by parties in a conflict. The latest edition of Phillip Knightley’s ground-breaking work builds on this idea, tracing the role of war correspondents from the Crimean War, when William Howard Russell of the London Times became the first civilian to file dispatches from the front line, up to the conflicts of our time. In The First Casualty, Knightley takes a critical viewpoint on the works of war correspondents through changing times. Knightley offers a stinging indictment of war correspondents, arguing that these supposedly heroic figures miss the real story through prejudice, gullibility, censorship, suppression, or propaganda.

In his exploration of reporting in the Kosovo conflict, Knightley comes to a somber conclusion, describing Kosovo as “the military’s final victory” over independent war journalism.

Now that the West is engaged in another war, the war against terrorism, does that view hold? Have journalists become pliant mouthpieces for the government and military in regurgitating spin and propaganda, failing to equip the public with the facts needed to make an informed assessment of leaders’ responses?

As the book itself suggests, reality is more complex and coverage has been very mixed. There are now many reporters, editors, and producers who have become “seasoned,” as in recent years one international crisis has followed another; they know what to look for and how to resist manipulation and spin.

Knightley’s book attempts to promote discussion and critical reflection, which will enable journalists to process, share, and compare their experiences as well as to build up a collective professional memory, the lack of which, he says, is their abiding failure.

It appears that such earnest attempts by Knightley and others have proven at least partially successful. One encouraging sign in recent coverage has been the preparedness, by many reporters, to penetrate the fog of war — so often deliberately cultivated by those waging it, as readers of The First Casualty will see — and insist on recalling the initial stated aim of the operation when assessing any new developments. In light of the recent US campaign in Afghanistan, such concerns seem a worthy focus for journalistic integrity.

Typical of this tendency was Jonathan Steele’s article in London’s Guardian (December 11, 2001), in which he argued that “Afghans have paid a high price for a campaign that has failed to meet its original aim” of bringing to justice those who masterminded the September 11 attacks and eliminating the training bases of the terrorists.

This current perspective can be contrasted with the journalistic response to the Kosovo Crisis, which caused Phillip Knightley to despair. Back in 1999, few reporters reminded the public that the initial aim of the NATO bombing, to avert a humanitarian catastrophe, was quickly amended to reversing a disaster when an exodus of refugees from the province was triggered by NATO’s bombs. In addition, they failed to comment on the fact that certain provisions directed against Belgrade in the draft accord made at the failed Ramboulliet negotiations were dropped to get Russian agreement for NATO to enter Kosovo under UN auspices.

Such episodes leave their mark and there are signs that journalists are learning from them. The concept of war crimes is familiar today, but Knightley reminds us how the focus of war journalism changed over time to incorporate the critical coverage of such atrocities. He analyzes a crucial turning point in the coverage of war crimes by describing the massacre of civilians by US troops in the infamous hamlet of My Lai. The First Casualty devotes a number of graphic pages to why the horror of the story was ignored by journalists in Vietnam and to the ideologically driven nature of the US military campaign there. Peter Arnett, who was a correspondent for the Associated Press (AP) during the Vietnam War, commented that even if he knew a war crime was taking place he would not have described it as such since that would have been passing a judgement, and as a correspondent for AP he dealt only in facts.

The new generation of journalists is different, thanks to writers like Roy Gutman, whose handbook Crimes of War provides guidelines on when journalists can pronounce a battlefield atrocity as going beyond the scope of military combat.

However, there is evidence that a line deferential to the authorities is still being followed by many reporters. For example, some journalists in the wake of the war in Afghanistan have criticized the US media for not pursuing the story of the suppression of the Qalai-Janghi prison revolt, which left 600 dead.

Censorship was suspected in the US media’s reluctance to cover the story, and The First Casualty describes, from one armed conflict to the next, how the military built up effective censorship over time by restricting access to information. With the current explosion of media, that has become much more difficult to do. Despite the US media’s reluctance to cover the Qalai Janghi story, non-US media have probed the story extensively, documenting in graphic detail the horrible deaths. Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom ran a story (December 2001) about the involvement of special forces in the siege of Qalai Janghi, using exclusive pictures shot by an Afghan cameraman. The military can no longer prevent these types of facts from being publicized. Censorship has ultimately proved ineffective.

What is much more important now is spin, or convincing the public that what we are seeing is important (or not, as the case may be). For example, the abiding image of the Kosovo conflict was of Albanian refugees, their faces contorted by grief, rage, and fear, streaming across the province’s borders. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Steele notes that in the bombing of Afghanistan, the numbers of refugees were far greater, the danger of death by starvation and cold almost certainly more pressing, but reporters have found it difficult to sell refugee stories to their editors.

The US government appointed a senior advertising executive, Charlotte Beers, as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy to coordinate message control and spin during the war on terrorism. This tendency to sell news is not new. Knightley quotes then-Downing Street Press Secretary Alastair Campbell, in a speech after the Kosovo crisis, defining the job of wartime public diplomacy as “holding the public’s interest on our terms.” In his book, Knightley draws a link between this media policy and the superficiality of much war reporting.