Well it's the end of the week, and so it appears that this will be the end of our group-blogging on the topic of Greg Mitchell's book, So Wrong For So Long. But in the course of some of the back-and-forth on the comments pages it occurred to me that I might have one more useful thing to offer whilst wearing my historian's hat. So, without more ado, here is a brief annotated bibliography of some other books you might be interested in after you finish Greg's book.

Leading the pack, sadly, is the book which many J-Schools seem to consider the gold standard insofar as a history of the military and the media relationship goes. The First Casualty, The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from the Crimea to Kosovo by Phillip Knightley, has been around for quite some time. Though as the Kosovo reference makes clear, the book has been updated, the main text remains the same. It is not a bad book, per se, but Knightley is a journalist, not a historian. While some journalists are magnificent historians (Rick Atkinson, for example) not all are so scrupulous.

More to the point, Knightley is a journalist from the Times of London. Now that is fine, except that it appears that because of this background Knightley displays a very obvious bias. He tends to portray everything as having been invented by the British. For example, as Knightley tells it the first real "war correspondents" were those Englishmen from, you guessed it, the Times of London, who covered the war in the Crimean in 1854. That rankles this historian who knows darned well that the first professional journalists to cover an overseas wars were American reporters covering the Mexican-American war in near-real-time in 1848. (Knightly also manages to more or less gloss over the entire American Civil War…except where it was covered by Englishmen.)

Perilous Times, Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey Stone is, in my opinion, a real keeper. No need to explain more than that, as the title is pretty self-explanatory by itself.

Finally, for a good general compilation work in which you can read for yourself how journalism evolved in its coverage of the military I recommend The Faber Book of Reportage, (John Carey, editor). It is solid, well sourced, and while it is impossible for any one book to be "comprehensive," it does provide enough material so that one gets a good feel for the nature of the reporting in each era. It is a compilation of stories from a host of military conflicts.

The next four books are some of my favorites, and they all cover the period in which the military-media relationship really kicked off here in the States, the American Civil War. The first book in this category is The General and the Journalists by Harry Maihafer. In this one learns of the strange relationship between General Ulysses Grant, publisher Horace Greeley, and journalist-turned-staff-assistant Charles Dana. It is an interesting story which illustrates how blurred the lines once were.

We think of "citizen journalism" (or blogging) as something which is brand new and without precedent. Of course we historians are fond of pointing out that this is usually not so, most things seem to have precedents. Writing and Fighting the Civil War (William Styple, editor) makes that very point crystal clear. In the Civil War, you see, most papers could not afford to send a reporter to accompany the armies…so they arranged deals with soldiers from local units to write back home (for a very small stipend sometimes, or often for nothing at all) and send their unvarnished, unedited, and uncensored personal observations about anything and everything from within their unit. In short, there were de facto "citizen journalists" in uniform. This edited book is a compilation of many, if not all, of the military related stories which ran in the New York city-based Sunday Mercury during the Civil War.

A few years after he put that book together Styple went to the other side of the lines and assembled Writing and Fighting the Confederate War, which is a compilation of the reporting done by one particular Southern reporter over the course of the war. (For various reasons the reporting in the South was almost completely dominated by a few Richmond-based reporters and most other newspapers in the Confederacy merely copied their text.)

Finally there is my favorite for this era, The Bohemian Brigade, Mostly Rough, Sometimes Ready by James Perry. Collectively the Northern journalists who reported mostly from the East Coast (but sometimes from other areas) referred to themselves, self-mockingly, as "The Bohemian Brigade." Perry picks up on that and has written an engaging, easy to read and historically accurate account of this group of men and the journalism they produced.

The next two books are by Michael Sweeney and they are both pretty good, if somewhat overlapping. The Military and the Press is a good general overview, in some ways a little drier than it needs to be, and perhaps filled with a bit more inside baseball than most people might be interested in. I would recommend skipping the foreword by Roy Gutman, as that is so biased, inaccurate, and confused that it almost puts one off the book entirely despite the short length of the foreword. Sweeney's other book is Secrets of Victory, The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II, and it too is a solid work of scholarship. You might not need both books, however, since Sweeney extensively copies passages from Secrets of Victory and effectively recycles the same text in the relevant period coverage in The Military and the Press. If you are on a budget, buy Knightley for overview, and Sweeney for the censorship story.

Now I know that this next recommendation will potentially annoy some, but bear with me. The best overall books on the history of the military-media relationship during the Vietnam War are The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 and The Military and the Media vol. 2, 1968-1973, by William Hammond. Why might this annoy? Because these two books are the "official" histories, as written by the U.S. Army's Center for Military History. But folks, please, take my word for it, the historians at CMH actually are historians, real academic historians, who do not sugarcoat or gloss…well, no more than other university based historians do. Yes, there are lots of other books by journalists from the war and about the war, but those are often first-person accounts (Herr's work Dispatches, for example) and not dispassionate history, and as such they suffer from the same problems that general's memoirs suffer from. So if I was teaching a course about where things were, historically speaking, throughout the war, my foundation books I would assign would be these two. Then I would lead through students through the other discussions/debates which come from individual memoirs of both journalists and soldiers.

So far as I know there is really only one "how-to" book about the problems and solutions of covering the military and that is Pen & Sword, a Journalists Guide to Covering the Military by Ed Offley. It is not prose, it is literally a descriptive step-by-step on where to find the stories, how to deal with the military establishment (or make end runs around it), and how to make sense of some of the confusing things we in uniform do.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not recommend, in the strongest terms, Mission Al Jazeera by Josh Rushing. Rushing is the Marine officer seen in the documentary "Control Room," who, after learning that he was more or less going to be pigeonholed because of his doing the job he was ordered to do, got out and went to work for Al Jazeera (English). It is a classic study of all that is right about the military…and all that is wrong. Rushing is an icon of the sort of men we want in uniform, but he is pushed out and marginalized by the Marines because, well, he lived up to the moral code which we are all supposed to embrace. His transition from the military to journalism is a fascinating tale.

Oh, and if you want to read about life on the line from the soldier's perspective, I can think of no better example of "citizen journalism" than the site "Army of Dude." Somebody should offer this kid a job.