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E-book The War Correspondent
William Howard Russell is widely regarded as one of the first war cor-respondents to write for a commercial daily newspaper. He became famous for his dispatches from the Crimean War, 1854–56, for TheTimes and he seemed to appreciate that he was blazing a trail for a new breed of journalist, calling himself the ‘miserable parent of a luckless tribe’. Charles Page, an American contemporary of Russell, also seemed to see the miserable and luckless side of the job. In an article entitled An Invalid’s Whims...The Miseries of Correspondents, he compared himself and his colleagues to invalids, ‘proverbially querulous and unreasonable. They may fret and scold, abuse their toast and their friends, scatter their maledictions and their furniture’ (1898, p. 143). The war correspon-dent, he warned, ‘will inevitably write things that will offend somebody. Somebody will say harsh things of you, and perhaps seek you out to destroy you. Never mind. Such is a part of the misery of correspondents’ (ibid., p. 146). During the Anglo Zulu war of 1879, a ‘Special Correspon-dent’ for the Natal Witness (19 June) complained that ‘[To] enthusiastic persons, the position of War Correspondent may be a very pretty one...but a little practical experience of such work will rub off a great deal of its gloss’ (Laband and Knight, 1996, p. v). More recent and contemporary accounts suggest these impressions have changed little since the nineteenth century. In Dispatches, Michael Herr recalls some of the things political commentators and newspaper columnists called him and his colleagues during the course of the Vietnam War. They were called ‘thrill freaks, death-wishers, wound-seekers, war-lovers, hero-worshippers, closet queens, dope addicts, low-grade alcoholics, ghouls, communists [and] seditionists [...]’ (1978, p. 183). With the growth of media journalism in the 1990s, the media reporting the media, war reporting has become a story itself. Coverage of war is bound to feature articles and TV programmes looking at various issues that reporters face in the war zone. As the first bombs fell on Afghanistan n October, 2001, the Independent carried a special feature item on 13 October, highlighting the conditions experienced by journalists who were not even in the country a week but were already missing their home comforts: ‘Reporters live on bread, onions and water from gutter’; ‘Foreign correspondents are down to one lavatory per 45 people’. The capture by the Taliban of the Sunday Express reporter Yvonne Ridley seemed to put these discomforts into perspective, if we were to believe ‘a world exclusive’ in the Daily Express, published just after her eventual release on 8 October 2001.
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