War Reporting

The interviews were made on behalf of the three-part documentary series De waarheid ligt op het slagveld (16mm film), which Roelof Kiers made for VPRO television about the role of reporters in various wars. Jan Blokker, a Dutch journalist, also helped to create the series. The documentaries was broadcast on November 26 and December 3 and 10, 1978 and lasted a total of 5 hours and 45 minutes. In the VPRO guides of the weeks in which the series was broadcast, background articles relating to the episode under discussion were included.

The first episode, subtitled “…or should I hold my tongue?”, features an interview with Ross Munroe in addition to an overview of reporting from the Crimean War through the Vietnam War. Munroe, a Canadian war correspondent, talks in the interview, among other things, about the raid on Dieppe in August 1942 and what he had to consider in his reporting at the time. The second episode, titled “It was all rock and roll,” incorporates interviews with American reporters of the Vietnam War: Peter Arnett (Associated Press), David Halberstam (New York Times; Pulitzer Prize winner), photographer Tim Page (Life, Time) and CBS television reporter Jack Laurence. The third installment, “Bitte, berichten Sie,” features excerpts from Kiers’ conversations with some of the journalists who provided news coverage on the side of Nazi Germany during World War II. They were then united in the so-called Propaganda Kompanien (PK): Katzke (cameraman east front), Riegger (leader PK team west and east front), Stephan (leader department PK press Propagandaministerium), Viertel (radio reporter east front) and Heysing (journalist west and east front). Interviews that were not included in the series are the interviews with PK reporters Nannen and Ritter von Schramm.