Different Wars, Different Journalism

"For when you have shared even a little in the mighty experience of a compassionless destruction, you have taken your partnership in something that is eternal. And amidst it or far away, it is never far out of your mind." - Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle understood war because he witnessed it first hand. He dug trenches and took fire with the front-line men. He wrote about the "common" soldiers, the "good boys" who did things no one should ever be asked to do. He portrayed World War II in a way that made America and its G.I.'s look good. His writing wasn't all the truth, but as Arthur Miller said: Pyle "told as much of what he saw as people could read without vomiting."

James Tobin's Ernie Pyle's War, published in 1997 and again in 2006, is an historical biography with a lot of insight about the little man who probably isn't well known among people of my generation. But he connected with thousands during the 1940s.

His method was simple: Get stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. His concept for stories might not have been breaking news, but he connected with readers more than any other war correspondent. His editors loved him, his readers adored him and the U.S. military couldn't have been happier with the majority of his coverage. In fact, it was his favorable coverage that has brought the most criticism about his work. But Tobin ascertains it was in the context of his time.

"After all, journalism is always written within some cultural context, and the unchallengeable context here was that the war needed to be won," Tobin writes.

Pyle was able to converse with the soldiers without it feeling like an interview, which enabled him to write stories such as this one, The Death of Captain Waskow:

At the Front Lines in Italy - "…Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain's hand, and he sat there a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone."

In 2005, Tobin added an afterword to the book to reflect on Pyle's work during America's present war. Tobin poses the question: "Why isn't there an Ernie Pyle today?"

He offers a number of possible answers, but one I think is poignant. Before Pyle was a war correspondent, he had been a reporter for 20 years. His editors had allowed him to travel the United States to write a column about ordinary people: They had faith that Pyle would find stories even in the most obscure places. And most often, he did. He developed a knack for man-on-the-street reporting, something he used well in the military.

The fact is, not many journalists get this kind of experience today. Tobin points out that much of what makes its way to newspapers as news comes from editors handing off stories to reporters, not from reporters going out and exploring the world to develop story ideas. It often works like this: What is the New York Times covering? What's AP got on the wire? And those things become news. You can imagine how much is missed by creating news packages this way.

Journalists are to blame, too. Who would want to leave a cushy office setting, summarizing press releases and government reports, to go out into the world and actually look for stories?

And many news organizations focus on reporting what people "want" to know about. I use quotation marks because most often people don't report what they really want. Many people will say they want politics, religion, cultural analysis, etc. Yet one of the most popular forms of "journalism" is celebrity journalism. To make matters worse, as more and more people use television as their only news source, print journalism suffers financially, giving journalists even fewer resources.

Tobin writes: "…TV journalism is like a strobe light; you look and look, but you never seem actually to see."

There is no Pyle figure in today's war, just as there wasn't one in the Korean War and certainly not one in the war in Vietnam.

Tobin writes, "Today, even more than then, we need war correspondents who look beyond the clash of arms to ask about cultures, causes and consequences."

War correspondents today do the best they can in the circumstances they are in; their circumstances are just a lot different than they were in the 1940s.