War Correspondents: What are they
War Correspondents are media representatives who accompany the armed forces without being members in the case of an international armed conflict.
Should they be captured by enemy forces, they benefit from the prisoner of war status. The difference between these correspondents and typical reporters is that reporters work for a specific newspaper or broadcasting network in a particular area, and correspondents report news from a particular region or country on specific topics.
Frances FitzGerald
Frances Fitzgerald is the daughter of a High ranking CIA official father and a socialite for a mother. She was a very unlikely war correspondent because she was raised in immense privilege with maids, and horses growing up.
It was her family’s connections that got her foot into the door of journalism in New York but it was clear that her gender was holding her back even with her family connections.
At the age of 25 she traveled to Saigon just as the American war was escalating in 1966
Fitzgerald avoided competing with her male counterparts by focusing on a different aspect of war, which interested her
Being sheltered all her life, Frances Fitzgerald was shocked at how the Vietnamese suffered.
Their suffering was not simply the loss of life and injury but also a loss of cultural identity
While most of the men were focused on the fidgeting and death, Fitzgerald primarily spent her time in villages, hospitals, and slums because heavily intrigued by Buddhist politics and the history and culture of Vietnam
She covered how operation masher was impacting South Vietnamese civilians and regularly visited the village of Duc Lap where she interviewed villagers to write "Life and Death of a Vietnamese Village" which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in September of 1966.
Margaret Bourke-White
Born in New York City in 1904
Attended Columbia University in 1921 and took a photography course at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in 1921-22.
She received her first camera, a second hand 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ inch ICA Reflex with cracked lens
Her work caught the eye of Henry Luce, the publisher of Fortune who then hired her in 1929, where he sent her to the Soviet Union to take pictures.
Over the next several years throughout World War II, she produced a number of photo essays on the turmoil in Europe and was the only Western photographer to witness the German invasion of Moscow in 1941.
She was also the first woman to accompany Air Corps crews on bombing missions in 1942 and she traveled with Potton’s Army through Germany in 1945 as it liberated multiple concentration camps.
In 2011 CBS news correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob of 2 to 3 hundred men while covering Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square. Many women then spoke out about their assaults while away covering conflicts. When this information surfaced, a debate began about a woman's place in the war zone.
Women Reporters Face 'Bizarre Patronizing' In the Field
Susan Reimer who was a correspondent at the Baltimore Sun, was told by an editor that "he would be willing to send me on an assignment where I could be killed--but not one where I could be —--."
Women are asked repeatedly by interviewers about leaving children behind in order to cover war zones, But men are not offered this line of questioning as frequently
Physical assaults are more likely
In the case of Lara Logan, there were several other women in the mob with her who were not harmed. Many said this was because Lara was “Petite and attractive” comments which correspondents there with Lara that say like Angela Johnson of The Daily Mail called her “ignorant” and “offensive
