Model school essay — The Season I like Most

Akki says:

The media of written war reporting are newspapers, magazines, and now, the virtual
texts available on the internet. Each medium has its own poesis or approach to
writing; variables such as deadline dates, frequency of publication, editorial policy
and etiquette, amount of space devoted to the story, and the availability of
illustration result in pieces ranging from the urgently laconic to the leisurely
reflective, from the briefly factual to the complexly opinionated, from the quirkily
personal to the broadly synoptic. (Television and radio war journalism have their
own set of variables.) But despite these variations, modern war correspondence,
from its beginnings, has had a primary objective–to achieve believability through
an ethos (the Aristotelian term for persuasive appeal located in character) based on
autopsy or firsthand experience. It is this objective that underlies the practice that
was in its infancy in 1808 when the London Times sent Henry Crabb Robinson to
Spain to report on the British forces fighting the Peninsular War. The first conflict to
which American newspapers sent correspondents on a significant scale was the
Mexican War. Indeed, newspaper proprietors such as George Wilkins Kendall,
founder of the New Orleans Picayune, actually agitated for the conflict in the first
place. John Hohenberg observes that, “it was the fashion for correspondents to
prove their daring by fighting rather than sit on the sidelines as non-combatants”
and proving his proximity to the action, Kendall, one of forty correspondents in
Mexico, captured a Mexican Cavalry flag, was mentioned twice in dispatches, and
was wounded in the knee.
Though newspaper articles about war lack the true dialogic nature implied by the
etymology of ‘correspondence’, their epistolary qualities suggest the necessary
mutual confidence of the reader-war reporter relationship . The importance of
maintaining this confidence is evident in an anecdote told by Emmet Crozier, who,
in 1918, was working on The New York Globe and nursing a desire to go to France
as a war correspondent. A colleague brought Crozier ‘odd fragments’ about the war,
‘secondhand’ material some of which Crozier suspected was fabricated, but which
represented his only chance to be a war correspondent. After the war, Crozier
discovered that all the material was fabricated and felt that a dirty trick had been
played on Globe readers and on the integrity of journalism.
The reader-war reporter relationship, then, is founded on a credibility/ closeness
ratio. Next to proximity in importance is priority. News of war, in other words, must
be fast as well as accurate. Legendary ‘scoops’ include Marguerite Duras reaching
Dachau for the Herald Tribune before the American troops arrived; Doon Campbell
getting first to the Normandy beaches for Reuters; Max Hastings of the London
Evening Standard walking first into Port Stanley in 1982; Bob McKeown making
the first live broadcast for CBS from Kuwait City in 1991; and, in the war in
Afghanistan, John Simpson ‘liberating’ Kabul for the BBC. Such ‘firsts’ themselves
become the ‘peg’ or ‘frame’ for the news material, often with the undesirable result of
transforming the reporter into the story. As may be seen from these instances,
accessing the war zone requires considerable resourcefulness and resilience on the
part of the war correspondent, who must operate as a ‘tactician’. Using clever tricks,
the knowledge of how to get away with things, “hunter’s cunning” moves along with
joyful discoveries, the successful war recorder situates himself or herself into the
arena of war.
Success has been more elusive for women war correspondents, traditionally denied
access to this arena. In Journalism for Women : A Practical Guide, Arnold Bennett
advised female journalists to confine themselves to the “woman’s sphere”-fashion,
cookery, and domestic economics, furniture, the toilet, and less exclusively,
weddings and what is called society news. In the context of conflict, this mentality
limits women to what may be called parapolemics-those spatial and temporal
margins of war that include such phenomena as visits to the hospitals and
orphanages, the home front, interviews of the waiting and the bereaved, and the
domestic war front.