In The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley traces the extensive history of war correspondents. Beginning with the Crimean War, he shows how these reporters gradually ingrained themselves in the fight at hand, bringing truthful, unfiltered coverage to their readers or viewers at home. Yet sometime around the Falkland War, the tables turned, and the military realized the strategic importance of manipulating the media. The role of the correspondents suddenly became more ambiguous, and, forced to work on the military’s terms, these reporters found themselves at a “crisis point in their short history” (525). In chapters 19 and 20, which cover the Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia, Knightley shows us the questionable tactics with which the U.S. and Allied militaries manipulated war coverage. By severely limiting access to information these officers managed to turn the reporters against one another, and with carefully spun propaganda, to turn the home front against the more resistant reporters. At points in these chapters, The First Casualty reads less like a history text and more like a Dan Brown novel; such is the level of the government’s conspiracies. In other places Knightley uses cold hard statistics to make startling revelations about the wars. While the writing sounds one-sided, even preachy at times, it never strays far from the question at hand: is war coverage in today’s age a right or a privilege?

Much of chapters 19 and 20 are dedicated to revealing government fabrications, news stories that have little or no basis in true events. However, as Knightley points out, such tactics are now part of standard military procedure. Press officers are even instructed to “lie directly only when certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of war” (484). Time after time, Knightley claims, the United States did just that during the Gulf War – it lied. The justification was usually that winning the war trumps less immediate ethical issues (the same argument has been made regarding domestic wiretapping).

But how does one justify lying to begin a war in the first place? In 1991, seeking to influence an American invasion of Iraq, the Citizens for a Free Kuwait signed a $10 million contract with Hill and Knowlton, a well-known American public relations company. Together they found a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl and coached her to give a moving speech in front of Congress about how Iraqis had murdered “incubator babies” before her eyes. Two years later, it was revealed that the story “was a total invention” (488), long after the U.S. had fought and won. The distraught girl was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The president of Hill and Knowlton, Craig Fuller, had actually been Vice President Bush’s chief of staff during the Reagan years. When I read about this elaborate scheme, Jay Rosen’s facetious advice came to mind: if you want to outsmart the media, create something huge - conspiracy huge. This corporate branding of the Gulf War seemed to come right out of Wag the Dog, especially the scene where the “Albanian” girl runs screaming across a Hollywood soundstage. Given the relative success of the Gulf War, few people later questioned the terms of its inception, but with the less successful and more prolonged Iraq II it is easy to see how this model of dishonesty can turn against itself.

Knightley reminds us that “propaganda works best not with arguments but images” (507), and the Gulf War, the “deadly videogame,” is full of such images. Unfortunately, much of this consists of stock footage, videos of flying missiles and building explosions drawn from official press packets. Occasionally, a maverick reporter like Peter Arnett of CNN would broadcast from across enemy lines much to the chagrin of press officers. The general public had a similar attitude: if anything gruesome or “unpatriotic” made it to broadcasting, their response was somewhere between apathy and outrage. For these viewers the Gulf War was clean, quick, and surgically precise; anything that contradicted this storyline was considered a threat to U.S. moral. By the time the Kosovo conflict rolled around, NATO had developed a system of pools whereby a small group of selected journalists, led by military personnel, could report back to the larger group waiting at base. Members of the press were made to wear uniforms and threatened with detainment if they did not comply by the rules. As a result, almost no one took risks, so starved were these reporters for even the slightest bit of news. In vying for the few spots closer to the front line, journalists turned on one another, so that a correspondent’s “worst enemy turned out to be his colleagues in the pools” (492). Sadly, the days of collaborating in the name of some common, higher standard had come to an end.

In narrating the fall of the idealistic war correspondent, Knightley often comes across as one-sided. The history of media in the Gulf War and NATO bombings is still quite recent, and I would have appreciated a more objective viewpoint. Born in 1985, I am too young to remember these conflicts as current events and too old to have studied them in my history books. I therefore read The First Casualty with some hesitancy, aware that Knightley may be less objective than he had been in earlier chapters. There were some lines where he even sounded accusatory. “Why did the war end when it did?” he asks, “If you believe Nato or any of the alliance governments it ended because the bombing campaign had succeeded” (517). Such phrasing reminded me (not so pleasantly) of Michael Moore’s style. There’s even a point where Saddam Hussein starts to look like a down-on-his-luck, victimized saint. Later, Knightley gives a string of key words relating to journalism in Kosovo: “lies, manipulation, news management, propaganda, spin, distortion, omission, slant, and gullibility” (525). I’m not saying that I disagree with this attitude or dispute his claims; only that, in my opinion, the author loses some credibility by resorting to such emotionally charged word choice.

Most of the time, however, I found Knightley incredibly informative and convincing. His use of numbers, especially, was both straightforward and resonating. Commenting on the trend from field to tactical warfare, for instance, he notes that “at the beginning of the century, ninety per cent of casualties in war were soldiers; at the end of the century ninety per cent of casualties in war were civilians” (505). These types of statistics put the radical changes into a broader perspective. I also trusted Knightley’s insider status as a journalist. Throughout the book he managed to bring the history to an individual level, but in these later chapters those individuals sounded less like research subjects and more like personal colleagues. Moreover, I trusted his status as a non-American. In criticizing the leadership behind what were essentially two America led conflicts, he could afford to come across as critical without sounding unpatriotic (a dilemma for American journalists at the time). Overall, Knightley managed to focus on the media’s role without losing site of the broader political issues.

I put down The First Casualty feeling wholly informed and terribly disturbed. My trust of war correspondence, even recent history itself, is at an all time low. And, while I pity the loss of that idealistic war reportage that seemed to have peaked with Vietnam, I am also awestruck (and a bit horrified) by the grand scale and careful genius with which the Pentagon has managed to manipulate the media for its own good. With the current war in Iraq, I like to hope that correspondents have regained some of the edge they lost in the nineties. Either way, Knightley has taught me to look at the news with a much more critical eye.

Reference:
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimean War to Iraq. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.