War correspondent is one of the most dramatic news reporting jobs. A reporter on a war front runs the risk of being killed or wounded. War correspondents have covered fighting in all parts of the world.
Perhaps the first efforts to give readers quick and accurate news of a war were made by George W. Kendall, founder of the New Orleans Picayune. Kendall set up a system of messengers to speed the news of the Mexican War (1846-1848) back to the United States. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), correspondents for newspapers in both the North and South sent reports from the field by telegraph, often giving eyewitness accounts.
Richard Harding Davis was one of the first roving war correspondents to become well known. He covered the Spanish-American War (1898) and other major conflicts. During World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945), U.S. correspondents were free to move with the troops. But they had to submit their reports to government censors. Ernie Pyle’s descriptions of World War II endeared him to U.S. readers. During the Korean War (1950-1953), Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for war correspondence.
The Vietnam War (1957-1975) was the first war to receive widespread television coverage. Some correspondents, such as David Halberstam of The New York Times, raised questions about U.S. involvement in the war in their reports. These reports led to heated debates over the degree to which U.S. correspondents should be free to criticize national policy during a war.
At the start of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, the United States government set up a press pool system of coverage. This system restricted the number of correspondents allowed to enter the combat area or to interview participants and required these correspondents to pool (share) their information. The United States also set up a pool during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. In 2003, during the Iraq War, about 600 embedded journalists reported on the war while moving with U.S. and British military units.
See also Davis, Richard Harding ; Pyle, Ernie .
