ANOTHER ONE FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS!

(Aljazeera, Institute for Historical Review, Writers Guild of America, New Zealand Herald)

(Freedom Forum, Reporters without Borders, Reuters, Frazer Chronicle)

 

Well here we go again, those history writers, the authors who keep records through writing about man’s inhumanity towards man. Of course writers, authors, and specialized men and women who write about specific instances…..like the activity of man, his dreams, desires and primal needs. These people are all a necessity to insure that the worlds history of recorded for posterity.

 

Today, April 12, 2013 we are going to look back on the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice during the course of their jobs. The statistic touches many people, and makes me wonder exactly what in hell these dedicated people were thinking.

 

A war correspondent has to be a special a special breed of cat, why else would anybody leave a safe, warm and well paying job, and go into a war zone to report a military operation is way beyond me. But I’m glad that they did, otherwise the news of a particular war would be left to those soldiers on the ground how were dodging bullets.

 

The statistical information concerning the numbers of lost war correspondents tends to be somewhat muddled as many statistics in the inherently unpredictable atmosphere of a war zone. And not all news reports that come out of a war zone are laced with the truth, some are downright erroneous, the facts that are allowed to be reported.

 

To be a combat correspondent takes a whole bunch of different attributes, courage, dedication to duty, a desire to continually check and judge the accuracy of the facts as they are presented to you. And a willingness to seek out the truth in the event that the facts don’t add up.

 

A marvelous study has been done by Doral Chenoweth that records the number of war correspondents who were killed between May, 1940, to the last, Ernie Pyle, on April 18, 1945. Between the almost five year period, 54 war correspondents lost their lives in the World War II war zones from the Pacific Islands, to the Russian tundra, and finally on the battle fields of France, Italy and Germany.

 

The deaths of these brave men and women are chronicled alphabetically in book form depicting who they worked for, the theater of action they were in and what caused their death. In addition with the exception of one name, each has a webpage devoted to their life’s story.

 

In this small way, Doral Chenoweth brought these heroes’s from a bygone time, on forgotten military brides, beach-heads, and the rutted, muddy roads of Europe, back for everybody who cares to read about, it’s what a history writer does, it’s his sustenance, his reason for writing.

 

IT SEEMS UNBELIEVABLE THAT ONLY 54 DIED

I can’t get over that number…..54, you’d think that combat writers, who are inquisitive by nature, and usually are driven by a mission would have gotten their beaks shot off at a much higher rate, but the number came from the war department, the Bureau of Public Relations, Liaison Branch. Trying to get further information would be impossible, as records directly after the war were strewn throughout buildings, were in boxes, and in the back of duce and a half trucks.

 

These people, mostly men, were counted by accreditation in the number in the chow-line, and quarters, if a non-military man eat and slept in a billet, (sleeping area), they were usually counted as a combat news person.

 

The overall number of combat correspondents who lost their lives during World War II is unavailable, but a guess would be a thousand or so. News out of Russia, Japan, Italy, or Germany was slanted, and the records of these country’s war writers where probably not nearly as accurately kept as the United States.

 

If a person guessed at the total number of combat correspondents who perished during the war, a good guess would be around a hundred. Some writers from the United States were what would be called free lance writers, they wrote their stories, and sold them to news outlets in the United States. Nobody can tell how many of these people there were, and how many died.

 

It would be safe to say that every country on the face of the planet with a news source lost a war correspondent. As I mentioned before, (reporting the news was their job), and in some instances they paid for a story with their lives.

 

In many quarters of the United States, the people who are reporting the combat news of today feed all news outlets with their reporting. Of course the war on terror isn’t quite as dangerous as being imbedded with a Marine detachment on a Pacific Island in 1943, but Iraq and Afghanistan ain’t a walk in the park either.

 

War today is different than it was back in the 1940’s, in the 1940’s everything wasn’t a photo op, there were way too many bullets in the air, and bombs blowing the hell out of the land. But there is one striking difference from the battle fields of Iraq and Afghanistan and the battle fields of France, and Germany, deaths of combat correspondents. Depending on whom you believe, the war on terror has taken from 66, to 69, or 71, to 79 writers and at least 30 media assistants.

 

That to me is a shocking number, and it’s no wonder that the number is being under-reported or not reported at all. Combat reporters do not carry weapons, at least as far as I know, could you imagine Richard Engle sporting a pistol strapped to his hip, or a rifle slung over his shoulder…..didn’t think so.

 

DEADLIEST WAR FOR COMBAT JOURNALISTS!

A war journalist is just that, he or she writes about what they see or experience and either text, email or call their story to their editorial department. How that story is presented to the public isn’t really the responsibility of the journalist.

 

Agenda’s run rampant in the newspaper business, it always has, and always will, but a war reporter can only deliver his story as objectively as possible, and then move on to the next story. Aljazeera, the Muslim newspaper as some refer to it has lost “150 journalists and 54 media support workers in Iraq from US-led invasion since March of 2003 until the declared end of the war in December of 2011.

 

Since Aljazeera began reporting on the war in March of 2003, they were hit with a barrage of bellicose verbiage from Bush administration officials during the invasion and occupation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Aljazeera reporting on war activity as vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.

The United States bombed the newspaper’s headquarters in Kabul during the 2001 U.S. lead invasion of Afghanistan, and attacked the media outlet multiple times during the 2003 Iraq invasion despite the fact that Aljazeera supplied the Pentagon with their headquarters coordination in Baghdad in February of 2003.

 

To date, according to Reporters Without Boarders, 230 media professionals, 87% of which were Iraqis have lost their lives. The Brussels Tribunal has closely tracked Iraqi media workers deaths totaling 382 journalism and media workers.

 

No matter the number, it is way too high, and there is an obvious reason why governments, war departments and industrialists don’t want these deaths reported, it would hurt their bottom line mentality. The first reported death in March of 2003 was Aljazeera reporter Tareq Ayoub’s, a foreboding sign that war correspondents in war zones around the globe would be targeted as never before.

 

HAVE A NICE DAY!