Essay: When Journalists Die in War

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Certain responses are to be expected whenever a journalist is killed in a war. His employers will remark on his courage and devotion to duty, his colleagues on his professionalism; from close friends and family will come expressions of grief or anger. Occasionally, in the case of celebrities, a President will offer a eulogy, as did Harry Truman for Ernie Pyle, killed in the South Pacific in 1945: "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as the American fighting man wanted it told." The standard was dubious, but the praise sincere. For the public these moments pass rather quickly, like any death in a war. Yet these killings are central to the function of journalism. In odd ways, if briefly, they clarify the relationship among the news, those who report it and the people who seek those reports.

The nature of this relationship was illustrated in the deaths last week of two American journalists, Dial Torgerson and Richard Cross, who were killed when their white, rented Toyota was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade on a road in Honduras near the Nicaraguan border (see PRESS). Nicaraguan soldiers apparently added machine-gun fire to the damage of the grenade. This kind of story always startles people, though it is hard to say why.

In part the surprise simply comes from the announcement of a personalized death; two named and photographed victims in a war automatically draw more attention than statistical casualties. Then, too, there is something about the rhythm and character of their work: the white moving line of the automobile perpendicular to the guns, the pursuit of one profession bisecting another. There is the matter of their being journalists, who as cultural figures are always accorded a special (half revered, half resented) slot in the public mind, and of their being foreign correspondents in particular, with all the folklore glamour associated with that work. There is the influence of television, which has aggrandized the whole profession. It may also be that these deaths attract notice because they serve to remind people that risk entails the possibility of failure. It is acutely shocking to learn that risk takers can lose.

Of course, one must also allow for the possibility that the deaths of journalists are important only to other journalists, the attention given by the press being wholly disproportionate to true public interest. Yet this seems not the case. For a hundred years, war reporters have provided a basic service, apart from increasing the profits of their employers. "If it is a solitary profession, it is also a kind of loving involvement with history," Georgie Anne Geyer confessed in Buying the Night Flight: the Autobiography of a Woman Correspondent. The involvement is the reader's equally, journalism being history on the run. When the correspondent is removed, so is the citizen, who is then left to assess the conduct of a war by official and authorized reports. Not that one is ever sure that what the paper prints is what really happened, but the presumption, however grumpily arrived at, favors the more disinterested observer.