Over the past 150 years, he argues, the military and journalists have been battling for supremacy – and now the military have won. The soldier’s instinct – tell them nothing until the war is over, and then tell them who won – has beaten the journalistic imperative to reveal as much as possible, as soon as possible. Vietnam, says Knightley, was the zenith; Kosovo the nadir. I wonder. As the veteran war correspondent Jon Swain of the Sunday Times has pointed out, coverage of the war in Vietnam was nowhere near as free and uncontrolled as legend would have it. Yes, correspondents had access to the battlefield, courtesy of the US military. But were they lied to? Of course they were. And did they, often, print the lies? Of course they did. To be a journalist means trying to find out what has happened and is happening, and then to convey that, accurately, to readers, listeners and viewers. To be a war correspondent means doing the same thing, but in conditions often of great danger and always of great confusion. It is rare for the truth to be told in war-time, but to argue, as Knightley seems to, that war correspondents (most of them, at any rate) no longer even try to tell the truth is a gross, and grossly unfair, generalisation.

There have been two major changes since the first edition of this book was published in 1975 – one change in the way wars are conducted, and one in the way they are reported. First, both the Gulf war and the Kosovo operation were conducted almost entirely from the air. High-speed bombers, equipped with laser-guided bombs and missiles, attacked targets deep inside enemy territory, where few correspondents could gain access. How many people were killed? How much damage was done? Were the targets legitimate? Everyone knew what questions to ask; few came even close to finding the answers. There was no real battlefield; the damage was inflicted at long range, far away and out of sight. In both Iraq and Serbia, the few brave correspondents who stayed behind in “enemy” territory could see only what they were allowed to see, and then in the full knowledge that NATO and the Pentagon are not the only military organisations with sophisticated propaganda operations.

Take the bombing of the Amariyya shelter in Baghdad on 13 February 1991. Hundreds of civilians were incinerated alive, and I still have vivid memories of sitting in a BBC studio in London listening to a badly shaken BBC correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, describing the appalling sight he had just seen. This was not a correspondent lazily repeating the lies he had been told at some official briefing; this was a reporter doing what reporters should do, seeing for himself and then telling us about it. During the Kosovo war, others did the same thing: John Simpson and Mike Williams of the BBC, Julian Manyon of ITN, Robert Fisk of The Independent stayed on in Belgrade, ventured out when they were allowed to and reported, vividly and truthfully, what they saw. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and Paul Wood of the BBC, among others, crossed the lines into Kosovo at great personal risk; and in an earlier Balkan conflict, in Croatia in 1995, my colleague John Schofield, of the BBC radio programme The World Tonight, was killed while doing his job there. Surprisingly, Knightley seems to have been unaware of the work of Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times during the Kosovo war. Watson was in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, throughout the conflict, and his daily dispatches were a model of what a courageous and resourceful reporter can achieve. His work was made available via the LA Times website to a global audience, although inexplicably it seems not to have been syndicated to other papers. Watson has since written graphically of how he operated and what risks he ran (see BJR, Volume 10, Number 3, 1999), and he certainly deserves a place in the next edition of this book.

The second big change over the past 15 years has been the advent of “real-time reporting” and the development of 24-hour news channels on both radio and television. Highly mobile satellite communications technology means that radio and television correspondents can be on the air literally within moments of a new development, describing what they see and hear long before they have had a chance to make sense of it (although too often they are on the roof of a hotel, next to the satellite dish, where they have seen and heard nothing but are simply repeating what their editors tell them is running on the news agencies. This “roof-top journalism” has very little in common with war reporting but can sometimes be mistaken for the real thing). NATO and Pentagon briefings can be run live, in full, to feed the insatiable appetite of the non-stop news channels. And here, there is a real danger: that transmitting unexpurgated briefings can give undue weight to the latest product from the spin factory, that those sexy nose-cone pictures from cameras mounted on missiles are given a prominence which, months later, we learn is wholly undeserved. What responsible broadcasters must do – and what all half-way decent journalists will insist on doing – is put the briefings and the spins into context, question them and challenge them, so that viewers and listeners can form their own judgment, imperfect to be sure, about where the truth might lie.

Knightley accepts that there are still some correspondents trying to do what war correspondents have always done. What worries him is that under political and commercial pressure, they will soon no longer be allowed even to try. He writes: “I predict that [in future] control of war correspondents – both open and covert – will be even tighter and that in general this will be accepted by the media because in wartime it considers its commercial and political interests lie in supporting the government of the day.” Clearly, the risk is there, but Knightley is, I think, unnecessarily pessimistic. True, many journalists, and many media organisations, are content to accept the government line. There’s nothing new about that: it took correspondents in Vietnam many years before they could persuade their editors to let them tell it like it really was, rather than as the Pentagon would have them believe.

The multiplicity of news sources, particularly now online, should mean that good war reporting will always find an outlet. The invaluable work of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting is already charting the way forward. It may well be that commercial pressures will increase, but it is far too soon to write the war correspondents’ epitaph. They were never, nor claimed to be, heroes: they were, and are, professional reporters doing a professional job. And the best of those in action today are every bit as good as those of Knightley’s day.