Reporting America at War: An Oral History - Softcover

Tobin, James; Ferrari, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786888857 ISBN 13: 9780786888856

Publisher: Hachette Books, 2004

Synopsis

Now available in paperback--as seen on PBS, America's greatest and most influential combat journalists tell their own harrowing and revealing stories about the experience of covering war.

At the turning points of modern American history, from the beaches of Normandy to the jungles of Southeast Asia, war correspondents have served as our eyes and ears--sometimes even as our conscience. Courageous and controversial, they have captured war in all its brutality, folly, and drama. In the process, they have both reflected and altered America's sense of itself.

In this unique book--which covers all of our nation's major conflicts from World War II to the present--personal tales intermingle with explorations of such critical issues as censorship, propaganda, press ethics, and the press's relationship with the Pentagon, both before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Together, they form a vivid and illuminating account that is essential reading for all who seek to understand the nature of war and how we learn about it.

About this title

About the Author:

Michelle Ferrari, writer of the PBS series Reporting America at War, has been creating innovative and critically acclaimed documentary narratives for more than a decade. She was the writer of the PBS special Out of the Past and the American Experience documentary Seabiscuit, which earned her a 2003 Primetime Emmy nomination. Her work also has been seen on HBO and Cinemax, and has received honors from the Writers Guild of America, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, and film festivals nationwide. She lives in New York City.

James Tobin won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II. His most recent book is To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

From Publishers Weekly:

Beginning with Edward R. Murrow's live reports during the London blitz and ending with an epilogue on the second war in Iraq, this oral history contains transcripts of interviews with 11 top correspondents. Murrow is one of three deceased reporters included (the others are Martha Gellhorn and Homer Bigart), along with Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, Frank Gibney, Malcolm Browne, David Halberstam, Morley Safer, Ward Just, Gloria Emerson, Chris Hedges and Christiane Amanpour. Compared with correspondents who covered WWII and Korea, today's journalists tend to have more campaign ribbons. The New York Times's Hedges, for example, has covered Central America, the Middle East and the Balkans; Amanpour has reported for CNN from the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan. The correspondents who were in Vietnam-including Homer Bigart and Gloria Emerson-opine on the official disinformation campaign and the corruption of the Saigon regime, while Amanpour, who covered a different kind of war in Somalia, speaks of the impact of the repeated showing of footage of an American soldier's body being dragged through Mogadishu, which she says caused the Clinton administration to curtail the U.S.'s mission there. Tobin's introductions and transitional and informational interpolations within the transcripts hold this informative volume together. Just sums up the book's importance: "As long as there are wars, it is very important to know, in the details, how they are being fought [and] to know the manner in which people are dying.... If someone isn't there to report it, it's just a tree crashing in the forest with nobody to hear it." Photos.-- to know the manner in which people are dying.... If someone isn't there to report it, it's just a tree crashing in the forest with nobody to hear it." Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0786888857
• ISBN 13: 9780786888856
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260