From Front Page to Front Stage: War Correspondents and Media Ethics in British Theatre

Abstract

In 1927, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson declared in his review of the so-called ‘newspaper play’ Ink that by ‘an unwritten law, rarely violated, good plays cannot be written about the newspaper profession’ (qtd. in Ehrlich, 2004, p. 27). Yet, according to Douglass Daniel, as ‘a genre of television the newspaper drama is nearly as old as the entertainment medium itself’, and by 1977, the year when CBS launched its top newspaper drama, Lou Grant, 23 newspaper dramas had been broadcast in the US since 1949 (1996, pp. 2–3). But while analyses of the representation of journalism in film and television have illustrated the processes by which ‘journalism movies’ and ‘newspaper TV dramas’ have contributed to making ‘journalism matter in the popular consciousness’ (Ehrlich, 2004, p. 15), the changing nature of conflicts and wars since 1990 has also influenced ‘the modes of journalistic engagement’ (Allan and Zelizer, 2004, p. 13), since, as Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan argue, ‘the notion of journalists as neutral witnesses has become less tenable’ in times of increased media management (2009, p. 179).