Category Archives: publishing

by | 5 June 2005 · 9:51 pm

J-School as Seminary, Reporters as Missionaries

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who blogs on PressThink, offers an interesting essay, Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion, about journalism school as a seminary of sorts that churns out idealistic do-gooders who pretty much all share the same faith without realizing they belong to a minority faith that often differs radically from the faiths of their readers. (Also see Rosen’s earlier essay entitled Journalism Is Itself a Religion.)

I’m going to show you a passage where I think the religion of the newsroom appears in everyday life. It comes from a piece called The Useless Credential, which ran at testycopyeditors.org. The author, Darryl McGrath, graduated from the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1986, the year I joined the faculty at NYU. She writes:

I would tell the dean that this business does not know what to do with career reporters, the people in their 40s who realized years ago they were never going to make it to the New York Times or win a Pulitzer, but nevertheless loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden. (Yes, I’m still that idealistic.) We are the journalists who never wanted to move into the higher-paying jobs, like editing and management or newsroom Internet technology, because we absolutely loved being reporters. But as we got older, we realized that very few newspapers wanted to pay a salary that would allow us to continue doing what we do best: report. The journalism school did little to prepare me for this reality.

Which is a good point. Notice how McGrath said she still believed in the religion, despite salaries so pitiful they suggest employers do not. She said she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when she adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

More so now that we know about W. Mark Felt. If Deep Throat was not Hal Holbrook but the number two guy at the FBI, was he Woodward’s source, or was Woodward really his agent? Now look at Epstein’s conclusion: “agencies of government itself…” were mainly responsible for getting the truth out about Watergate. Suppose he’s right, more or less. Admitting it would crash a big portion of the religion.

Missionaries, anthropologists, aid workers, peacekeepers, and other such outside agents also frequently end up being used in power plays by rival leaders in their target communities.

The whole essay is worth reading, along with the comments.

via Instapundit

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by | 3 June 2005 · 9:23 pm

Reporting Both Sides from Spain, 1936-39

Ideological partisanship during the Spanish Civil War was every bit as blindly irresponsible as it is today with regard to the war in Iraq.

The main target for the [pro-Franco] Catholic press was Herbert Matthews. His newspaper, the New York Times, was determined to cover the war with impartiality and had formulated a plan to achieve this: it would print the news from both sides and would give both equal prominence, equal length, and equal treatment. This scheme, fine in theory, was a disaster and pleased no one. To begin with, the Times’ correspondent with the Franco forces was William P. Carney, a Catholic, who felt strongly about Republican excesses against the clergy, and who was simply not in Matthews’ class as a correspondent. Giving his stories equal length with Matthews’ often meant overplaying a bad story and cutting a good one. Next, the Times’ “bullpen,” its group of senior editors who read the news as it comes in and decide how much of it will be printed and where it will appear in the paper, was dominated at that time by Catholics who were known to reflect a Catholic viewpoint when assessing the news, with results ranging from playing down stories about birth control to playing up stories expressing alarm over Communism. And, third, the Catholic opposition to Matthews was much more active in pressing its campaign against him than his admirers were in supporting him.

How the New York Times’ plan worked out in practice can best be assessed by … examples….

In March of 1937, a large Franco force had struck towards Guadalajara, north of Madrid, but was stopped well short of its objective. Matthews went there and found that the attacking troops had been Italian. They had been routed and had left behind prisoners, rifles, machine guns, and some disabled tanks. Matthews talked to the prisoners (he knew Italian), examined the arms, and watched the dead Italians being buried. Back in Madrid, he filed his story, an important one because it contained the first positive evidence that Mussolini had sent not only arms and advisers but also an expeditionary force–a fact, at that time, of great political and emotional significance. To emphasise this point, Matthews wrote that the attacking troops “were Italian and nothing but Italian.” In New York, on the instructions of the assistant managing editor, Raymond McCaw, wherever the word “Italian” appeared in Matthews’ copy it was struck out and the word “insurgent”–one used to describe the Franco troops–was substituted. This was done even to the extent of making the quoted phrase read “they were Insurgent and nothing but Insurgent,” thus completely distorting Matthews’ point. To make matters worse, McCaw sent a cable to Matthews saying that the only papers to emphasise the Italian point had been those in Moscow and pointing out that, as far as the New York Times was concerned, “we cannot print obvious propaganda for either side even under bylines.”…

Small wonder that the editor at the New York Times responsible for the “Letters” column complained, “No matter who writes the dispatch [from Spain] the other side will accuse him of broadcasting propaganda or downright lying. In all my ten or twelve years’ experience with letters to the editor, I have never encountered a situation in which so much absolutely rabid partisanship was manifested. It is partisanship that cannot be reasoned with and which, consequently, gets nowhere.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 215-217

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by | 2 June 2005 · 5:29 pm

Waugh Reporting from Abyssinia, 1935-36

Nothing that the correspondents imagined about covering the [second Italian] war in Abyssinia could match the hilarious reality. When Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s irreverent novel of Fleet Street and the hectic pursuit of hot news in “Ishmaelia” by the newly appointed war correspondent William Boot, was published in 1938, it was hailed as a “brilliant parody” of his experiences in Abyssinia. What only the war correspondents present at the time knew was that Scoop was actually a piece of straight reportage, thinly disguised as a novel to protect the author from libel actions….

Unfortunately, the patronage of even the Emperor [Haile Selassie] himself was of no help in getting any real news. As [Daily Express correspondent O. D.] Gallagher noted, “a reporter who cannot speak the language of the country he is working in can never get at the facts because he is completely at the mercy of either his interpreter or the official handouts. Not one correspondent in Addis spoke Amharic except a Lithuanian, who was general assistant to Jim Mills of Associated Press. The rest of us had to rely on what our Abyssinian interpreters told us in their poor English or on official handouts.”

The interpreters/assistants/personal spies, as they were variously called, were cashing in on their ability to speak English and on the strength of their salesmanship. Waugh secretly employed an Abyssinian called Wazir Ali Bey, until, so he said, he found that Ali Bey was also secretly employed by nearly every other correspondent in the capital. It was no use for a correspondent to decide to dispense with an assistant and set out to find news for himself. For one thing, there was the language problem, and, still more important, the Emperor refused to allow the correspondents to leave Addis Ababa, claiming, probably with reason, that, since his tribesmen could not distinguish between an Italian and any other European, he could not be responsible for their safety. He also no doubt suspected that some of the correspondents might well be spies….

The clampdown on news from the Italian army coincided with the flush of invented stories from Addis Ababa. Since an invented story, unhampered by facts, makes more exciting reading than a heavily censored account of a minor engagement, newspapers plumped for the stories from Addis Ababa, and thus created a false impression of what was happening in Abyssinia.

Towns formerly held by the Italians were reported captured. Casualty figures were grossly exaggerated. [Herbert] Matthews has said he tried to tell the New York Times that lurid accounts from Addis Ababa should be treated with the utmost caution, but no one in New York appeared to pay any attention to this warning. What Matthews was up against, of course, was that the truth, that the Abyssinians stood no chance against the Italians’ mechanised army, was unpalatable; sympathy suspended the reader’s critical judgement, and he preferred optimistic but fake reports from Abyssinia to more factual reports from correspondents with the Italian army. Editors were not slow to sense this. “The commands of Fleet Street became more and more fantastically inappropriate to the situation,” Evelyn Waugh wrote. And as Wazir Ali Bey, the most active of the interpreter-assistants in Addis Ababa, retailed reports of more and more clashes in which the Italians suffered heavy casualties, “Wazir Ali Bey’s news service formed an ever-increasing part of the morning reading of French, English and American newspaper publics.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 187, 189, 193-194

Compare Inside the Information Bubble during the Ethiopian Famine, an excerpt from Robert Kaplan’s Surrender or Starve (Vintage, 2003).

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by | 31 May 2005 · 10:02 pm

GooglePrint and Extract Quote Policy

The New York Times of 25 May 2005 carried a story expressing the concerns of certain publishers about Googleprint’s plans to index and excerpt from works under copyright.

How long is a snippet? That is one of more than a dozen questions directed at Google Inc. this week by the executive director of the Association of American University Presses, the trade group representing university presses. At issue is whether Google Print for Libraries, the company’s plan to digitize the collections of some of the country’s major university libraries, infringes the copyrights of the authors of many books in those collections. The program will allow users to search the contents of books, displaying context-specific “snippets” of the texts of copyrighted works.

Well, similar questions apply to Far Outliers, now Kotaji, and other blogs that frequently publish excerpts from printed sources. So it seems appropriate to issue a statement about the policies of this blog with regard to excerpting from printed sources under copyright.

1. Far Outliers is strictly a noncommercial enterprise. I accept neither cash donations nor paid advertising. I earn no revenue and incur no cash expenses, other than the not inconsiderable cost of buying printed books. I buy and read a lot of books, many–if not most–of them from university presses.

2. I try to extract and post stand-alone vignettes that capture passing insights of larger works, many of which have to do with the stated theme of this blog. In other cases, I try to quote passages that add a degree of arms-length historical or extraregional perspective to current debates in the blogosphere.

3. I try to limit my excerpts to the equivalent of about 1 printed page per chapter. If too much of one chapter proves irresistible, I force myself to skip other chapters. I also try to quote much less from brand new titles than from older works.

4. For each extract quote, I provide a full bibliographical citation and include a link to either the publisher’s website (especially in the case of university presses) or to an online bookseller that carries the book. If the author has an informative website, I’ll often link to that, too. Most larger commercial presses do not sell from their own websites, but university presses often do because they publish such a large number of titles with such meager marketing budgets that they have a much harder time promoting their obscure and offbeat titles, which are often the ones that tend to capture my fancy. In short, I encourage my blog readers to purchase the books I find quotable.

5. If any publishers feel I have overstepped the bounds of fair use, they have only to email me and I will forthwith remove all citations of their works. But I would hope that most publishers recognize some promotional value in my citations from their works.

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by | 31 May 2005 · 1:54 pm

The Guardian’s Bolshevist Scoop, November 1917

Few correspondents witnessed [the] momentous events [of the Bolshevik Revolution], and even fewer understood enough of what was happening to appreciate their significance. High among these few stand the American journalist and poet John Reed, correspondent for The Masses, a radical liberal publication in the United States, who had been in Petrograd since August, and Morgan Philips Price, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent. Reed later became a founder of the Communist Party of America, and his sympathies from the beginning were with the Bolsheviks. But he saw the Revolution with the clear eye of a good and conscientious reporter, and his description of the events in Petrograd in November 1917 is unequalled. Reed, Philips Price, and Arthur Ransome of the London Daily News were the only Western correspondents allowed into the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute* ….

The Bolshevik Revolution might have taken newspapers by surprise, but they recovered quickly. Since they lacked the knowledge that Reed, Philips Price, and Ransome had acquired, they were able to state categorically that the Bolsheviks would not survive. This–and abuse of the Bolshevik leaders–was the theme of all the dispatches and comment in the days following the Revolution. David Soskice, the man the Manchester Guardian had sent to check on Philips Price’s accuracy, had fled from the Winter Palace across the frontier to Finland. The Guardian ran his dispatches, even though they directly contradicted those from his colleague. “The Bolsheviks must fall,” Soskice wrote from Oslo on November 24. The Times as early as November 12 had Lenin losing control. The Observer was certain that Bolshevism would soon perish, and the Daily News felt that all Bolsheviks were doomed, thus ignoring the opinion of its man-on-the-spot, Arthur Ransome, one of the few voices of accuracy and reason in the hysteria, who wrote: “It is folly to deny the actual fact that the Bolsheviks do hold a majority of the politically-active population.”

The newspaper reader in the United States, like his counterpart in Britain, could have been forgiven for believing that it was only a matter of days before the Bolsheviks were overthrown. The insistent theme of Russian news in the New York Times was that the Bolsheviks could last for only a moment. In the next two years this belief was faithfully fostered. Four times Lenin and Trotsky were planning flight, three times they had already fled; twice Lenin was planning retirement, once he had been killed, and three times he was in prison.

One of the main reasons for the gross misinformation that these reports spread was a growing apprehension as to the nature of Bolshevism, which encouraged wishful thinking about its early demise. As details of Lenin’s new social order filtered through to the West, the first signs appeared of the strong anti-Bolshevik sentiment that was soon to become fanatical. It was bad enough for the landed gentry of Britain and France that the Bolsheviks had overthrown their betters in Russia; it was terrifying that they now spoke of spreading this appalling political dogma throughout Europe and perhaps the rest of the world. So when the delegates at the Soviet Congress spoke of “the coming world revolution, of which we are the advance-guard,” The Times responded with an editorial saying, “The remedy for Bolshevism is bullets,” and The Times’ readers began to regard the Bolsheviks as a gang of murderers, thieves, and blasphemers whom it was almost a sacred duty to destroy as vermin.

This was confirmed by the Russian release of all the secret treaties negotiated between the Czarist regime and the Allies. Philips Price scooped the world here by calling on Trotsky and asking if he could print the treaties in the Guardian. Trotsky could not see Philips Price, but sent his secretary [whom Ransome later married] out with a bundle of documents and a message that he could borrow them overnight. A quick look convinced Philips Price that he had the original treaties and that they were political dynamite. There was an agreement giving France a free hand in western Europe on condition that Russia had a similar free hand in Poland; there was a cynical bribe for Rumania, if she would enter the war, by the offer of the Banat with its Yugoslavs, the Bukovina with its Ukrainian population, and Transylvania with its Magyars; there was an agreement splitting Persia between Britain and Russia; and, finally, there was the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, dividing much of the Arab world among the Allies.** Philips Price translated the documents, working through the night, and then telegraphed them in four or five dispatches to the Manchester Guardian, in which they were published in some detail at the end of November.

Compare the Guardian’s treatment of what was without doubt a major story with the attitude of The Times. The Times received a summary of the treaties from J. D. Bourchier, its Balkans man, who had stopped in Petrograd on his way to Japan. It published the summary, but made the amazing decision “not to inconvenience the British, French and Italian Governments, and to maintain silence about the Secret Treaties; also, as far as possible, to curtail its Petrograd correspondent’s despatches on the subject… As the governments themselves were bound by the Treaties to be silent, The Times decided it could only follow their example.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 158-161

* Reed “joined a Soviet propaganda bureau” (p. 163); Philips Price worked “as a translator in the Bolshevist Foreign Office” (p. 167).

It is true, as Philips Price has readily admitted, that by now he was no longer completely objective and that Marxist jargon had crept into his writing. “It was a pity, but understandable. I was young and impressionable and it was natural that I should start to write as I heard Lenin and Trotsky speak. If I could have kept the old Manchester Guardian objectivity, then my dispatches would have had more influence.” [p. 168]

Ransome “returned to Britain in April 1918”; authored The Crisis in Russia, “a full defence of the Revolution” (and also wrote numerous children’s stories); “contributed extensively to the Manchester Guardian“; and “married Trotsky’s secretary, Eugenia Shelepin” (pp. 163, 183).

** “The release of the latter agreement caused Britain great embarrassment, since she had already promised the Arabs independence in return for raising the Arab Revolt. T. E. Lawrence had to try to explain to the Arabs why the British had double-crossed them.” (p. 161)

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by | 27 May 2005 · 10:52 am

Kitchener vs. Churchill in the Sudan, 1898-99

Sir Herbert (later Lord) Kitchener, sirdar of the Egyptian army, advancing http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/sierra/sudan1896.htm”>against the Dervishes in the Sudan to avenge the death of General Gordon, did his utmost to hamper correspondents in every way he could. He particularly disliked Winston Churchill, who had pulled every string available to him to see action in the Sudan and thus advance his army career. Churchill eventually managed to get there by persuading the War Office to allow him to go out as a supernumerary lieutenant at his own expense. Kitchener was much annoyed, and it is hard to believe that, as Churchill tells it, when Kitchener learned that Churchill proposed to finance his campaign by writing for the Morning Post “he simply shrugged his shoulders and passed on to what were after all matters of greater concern.” Kitchener’s tactics were to make the twenty-six correspondents with him run exactly the same risks as his soldiers, to limit their telegraphic facilities to 200 words a day, and to give them no help, no briefings, no guidance, and little courtesy. It was not surprising that they hated him, and his disdain for them was behind what was to happen over war news at the outbreak of the First World War.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 56-57

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by | 26 May 2005 · 11:08 am

Reporting from the Sino-Japanese War, 1894

[James] Creelman, a Canadian by birth, had reported the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the capture of Port Arthur, perhaps his most famous piece. It is a textbook sample of vivid, concise reporting, forced on Creelman by communication difficulties. He was later able to elaborate his short cable, but the first account, on December 11, 1894, stands on its own.

The Japanese troops entered Port Arthur on November 21 and massacred practically the entire population in cold blood. The defenseless and unarmed inhabitants were butchered in their houses and their bodies were unspeakably mutilated. There was an unrestrained reign of murder which continued for three days. The whole town was plundered with appalling atrocities. It was the first stain upon Japanese civilisation. The Japanese in this instance relapsed into barbarism. All pretense that circumstances justified the atrocities are false.

The civilized world will be horrified by the details. The foreign correspondents, horrified by the spectacle, left the army in a body. The Japanese had offered Creelman a bribe to tone down his story, but he refused it. American public opinion, until then friendly to Japan, changed overnight.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 60-61

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by | 26 May 2005 · 4:57 am

Reporting from Mosul, 2005

Michael Yon, a journalist embedded with the U.S. military in Mosul, blogs his own take on war reporting as a business.

The media is an industry; but their business is not to report news. The industry needs a captive audience to beat the bottom line. The product is advertisement.

This is not a right or wrong. It’s just a business concept for moving merchandise, and every profession or industry has one. Doctors, soldiers, preachers, lawyers, journalists: everyone needs to earn a living. Only a reclusive holy man might argue otherwise, but most holy men also expect alms.

There are probably many reasons why violent acts get more attention than do acts of kindness. All of these reasons fit somewhere under the heading of human nature. Any person rummaging around in his or her own head while asking the simple question, “What do I find interesting?” is bound to find a few garish relics. Sex and someone else’s bad news will sell.

Finding or generating news can be costly. A good businessperson buys cheap, sells high. These points are obvious, but less conspicuous is how the media squeezes news cheaply from Iraq….

From a media executive’s perspective, where the CFO can occupy the same tier on the organizational chart as the managing editor, the math is easy: send a dozen journalists to Iraq, or hire one cheaply to live in Baghdad. The media gets a bargain rate on instant credibility from their “embedded journalist in the heart of the Sunni Triangle,” who spends a few minutes a day paraphrasing media releases, then heads downstairs for a beer at the hotel bar.

And now, for the rest of the story….

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by | 25 May 2005 · 12:46 pm

Reporting from the American Civil War

Like many other aspects of the Civil War, its war correspondents have been romanticised into legend….

The legend conveniently overlooks the fact that the majority of the Northern correspondents were ignorant, dishonest, and unethical; that the dispatches they wrote were frequently inaccurate, often invented, partisan, and inflammatory. Edwin Godkin [of the London Daily News] wrote of his American colleagues: “Their communications are what you might expect from men of this stamp–a series of wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells and the superhuman valour of the men, interspersed with fulsome puffs of some captain or colonel with whom they happened to pass the night.” Henry Villard, one of the better American correspondents, said, “Men turned up in the army as correspondents more fit to drive cattle than to write for newspapers,” and Professor J. Cutler Andrews, in his mammoth work The North Reports the Civil War, wrote, “Sensationalism and exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander, faked eye-witness accounts, and conjectures built on pure imagination cheapened much that passed in the North for news.” Given that it was an age of declamatory journalism and that objectivity was a rare quality, it is still a little disconcerting to find that one correspondent saw his job in these terms: “It is not within the province of your correspondent to criticize what has been done by the army or navy; nor will he state occurrences which it may be unpleasant to read.” Like him, most correspondents on both sides saw as an integral part of their task the sustaining of both civilian and army morale. A skirmish became “a glorious overwhelming victory,” a rout was transformed into “a strategic withdrawal before a vastly superior enemy,” a dead Confederate soldier had been not merely killed in battle but “sacrificed to the devilish ambitions of his implacable masters, Davis and Lee”; Confederate women had necklaces made from Yankee eyes, while the “unholy Northerners” used heads of Confederate dead for footballs. In this sort of reporting, accuracy mattered little, and the Northerner Henry Adams wrote from London to complain that “people have become so accustomed to the idea of disbelieving everything that is stated in the American papers that all confidence in us is destroyed.”

The correspondents fared little better in recognising the historic incident, in realising that they were privileged to be present at moments millions would later want to study as part of their nation’s development. No correspondent attending the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg took any notice of President Lincoln beginning, “Four score and seven years ago …” At the best, they reported, as did the Cincinnati Commercial, “The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and when the commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks,” and, at the worst, ended their accounts of the event with the single sentence “The President also spoke.”

One would have expected that the war correspondents from Europe, more experienced, more mature, and less involved than their American colleagues, performed more ably in the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority were as bad, if not worse. More subtle in their bias, more devious in their propaganda, and better assisted by the political intrigues of their editors, they completely misled their readers on what was really occurring in America. The Times of London was particularly bad.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 20-22

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by | 24 May 2005 · 12:13 pm

Reporting from the Crimean War

William Howard Russell [was], according to his epigraph in St. Paul’s Cathedral “the first and greatest” war correspondent. The greatest is open to dispute, and he was not the first …. But Russell’s coverage of the Crimean War [1854-1856] marked the beginning of an organised effort to report a war to the civilian population at home using the services of a civilian reporter. This was an immense leap in the history of journalism, so it is appropriate to begin with Russell, because, whether or not “the first and the greatest,” he was certainly, as he put it himself, “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.”…

Russell returned to London and fame. The Times made the gesture every war correspondent dreams of: it put aside his IOUs for advance expenses and told him he could start again “with what tradesmen call a clean slate.” He was placed on the list of Times foreign correspondents at £600 a year, providing “you will render monthly accounts of your expenditure showing a clean balance so that we may both know how we stand.” He had breakfast with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who, mistakenly believing that Russell’s criticisms of the conduct of the war must have been inspired by his having evolved constructive alternatives, disconcerted Russell by asking him what he would do if he were commander-in-chief of the army. After the war Russell’s dispatches were published in book form, and while awaiting new battles to cover he went on a lecture tour.

Clearly, it would have been hard for Russell not to have made a name for himself in the Crimea. This was the first time that a British army in the field had been subjected to any form of independent scrutiny, and it would have been difficult to miss its shortcomings. Russell certainly chronicled them, but he failed to understand and expose the causes. He concentrated his attacks on Raglan rather than on the system, not knowing that Raglan, a humane and sensitive man, had done his best to overcome the results of years of government neglect. Throughout the campaign, Raglan had made repeated requests for all manner of equipment and supplies to overcome deficiencies in the commissariat and the medical departments, but most of his requests had been ignored. When public clamour led to a demand for a scapegoat, Russell’s dispatches helped make Raglan a convenient choice.

Although Russell criticised the lot of the ordinary soldier in the Crimea, he was careful not to hammer too hard at a comparison with that of the officers, to whose social class he himself belonged. He did not write, as he could quite accurately have done: “While the troops, ill-clad to weather a Russian winter, try to ease their hunger with a watery stew made of doubtful horseflesh, tonight in the officers’ mess the menu consists of soup, fresh fish, liver and bacon, a shoulder of mutton, pancakes with quince preserve, cheese, stout, sherry and cigars.” Above all, Russell made the mistake, common to many a war correspondent, of considering himself part of the military establishment. The one thing he never doubted or criticised was the institution of war itself. He realised he had hit the right note in criticising the conduct of the war and that his dispatches suited The Times’ politics of the moment. (Russell tended to toe his paper’s editorial line despite his professional assessments.)…

It is clear that before the war ended the army realised that it had made a mistake in tolerating Russell and his colleagues, but by then it was too late. The war correspondent had arrived, and when the American Civil War broke out, five years later, 500 of them turned out to report the conflict on the Northern side alone.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 1-17

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