Ted Smith

About the Author: Ted Smith is a professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. This article was written before the cessation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf War.

A favorite quotation of wartime journalists, endlessly repeated and paraphrased, is Sen. Hiram Johnson's 1917 lament that "the first casualty when a war comes is truth." Ironically, it now appears that the first casualty of the war against Iraq may well have been American journalism, maimed by a multitude of self-inflicted wounds.

Clearly, the conflict has elicited a maximum effort from the press, including two days of continuous coverage by CNN [Cable News Network] and network television, daily special sections (and even a few extra editions) in the larger newspapers, and the deployment of hundreds of journalists...