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  • The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce
  • Robert L. Bateman
The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce. By Michael S. Sweeney . Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8101-2299-5. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxiii, 297 pp. $24.95

The worst thing about this book has nothing to do with the author. Michael Sweeney has created a solid work of scholarship here, which unfortunately is nearly undone by the blatantly antimilitary bias and flat-out ignorance reflected in the foreword to the book by Newsday editor Roy Gutman. Rarely has a text seen such disservice done by the anger, misunderstanding of the subject matter, and personal vindictiveness of the "noted person" who penned the foreword. In eight pages, Gutman embodies every negative stereotype of the out-of-touch elite journalism editor, capping the whole with his citation of that military classic by Carl von Clausewitz, "On Strategy." Lord save us from expert editors. The sad part is that the author of the book embodies none of these problems.

Despite the dreadful lead-in Gutman's ignorance provides, The Military and the Press is a decent book. The material presented is crisp and factual, and Sweeney's grasp of things military throughout most of the history he presents is much better than that of many of his peers within journalism or academic journalism schools. Unlike, for example, British journalist Phillip Knightley, whose book The First Casualty is considered the standard work in the history of the military-media relationship in English, Sweeney correctly places the beginning of organized journalistic reporting of war as occurring during the 1848 Mexican-American War. (Knightley, reserving pride of place for his own paper, the Times of London, always contended that the 1854 Crimean War was where war reporting first started.)

Sweeney is also balanced in his presentation of the various failings on both sides of the pen-and-sword divide. His characterizations of various military leaders' faults is generally accurate, and balanced by the periodic exposure of some of the problems of journalism and journalists over the past 160 years or so. While it is clear through most of the book that his personal affections are with the journalists, this is understandable, as Sweeney is not technically a neutral historian, but a professor of journalism. If I was teaching a survey course on American military history I would find this book to be a decent source for supplemental readings. What better route, after all, to explain how the American people were viewing any given war than through an examination of the lens itself? [End Page 968]

Unfortunately, the book is also marred in a significant way by redundancy. I use the word advisedly, since one cannot presumably plagiarize oneself. Sweeney has previously written on a related subset of the topic, specifically censorship during the Second World War. In that book, Secrets of Victory, he is also very even-handed and, I found, generally reliable. Unfortunately, it appears that great swathes of this more current work are lifted, if not exactly word-for-word from his earlier book, then nearly so. For example, this is how one passage appears in The Military and the Press:

Tribune reporter Stanley Johnston witnessed the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, 1942, on board the aircraft carrier Lexington. The Japanese navy torpedoed and dive-bombed the ship, and over the next eight hours it burned and sank. Rescuers pulled Johnston from the surface of the Pacific and put him aboard a transport headed for California. During the slow journey home, Johnston befriended an unidentified officer. The man showed the reporter the most sensitive of secrets: a communiqué detailing a Japanese battle group steaming towards Midway Island.

While in Secrets of Victory, the same topic was covered this way:

Problems began after Chicago Tribune reporter Stanley Johnston witnessed the battle of the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, 1942, aboard the aircraft carrier Lexington. The ship was hit by Japanese dive-bombers and torpedoes, caught fire, and sank eight hours later. Johnston was rescued, taken to New Caledonia, and put aboard the naval transport Barnett, bound for San Diego. While...

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