In God We Trust
Correspondents and journalists based in Japan were the first to arrive in Korea to cover the war, and they were followed by correspondents who flew in from all over the world to cover the war on the Korean peninsula. In the early days of the war news reports were not censored, but unlike today's news, correspondents' reports did not stream live from the war front. Early reports had to be sent to Japan via air transport, and from there they were transmitted worldwide. Eventually news releases were censored, which created another whole set of problems for war correspondents--especially those opposed to the war or those who witnessed the war one way, but were required to report it quite another way. Correspondents, photographers and cameramen had to rely on the American army for communications, transportation, and housing. Also, although war correspondents were technically "protected" by international conventions, that was not the case when they were in the field covering the progress of the war. Most front-line correspondents (as opposed to "headquarters correspondents") carried weapons--and sometimes they had to use them. In spite of the dangers they faced while trying to cover the war in Korea, by September 1950 there were 238 war correspondents in Korea and eventually there were 270. Some correspondents lost their lives or were wounded while trying to report the progress of the war. Others who survived it have since written books and articles about their memories of being in Korea as war correspondents.*
On this page is an incomplete list of civilian and military war correspondents. To add more names and information to this new page of the Korean War Educator contact us.
*In her memoir of the Korean War, Korean War correspondent Marguerite Higgins wrote, "Despite the much-publicized 270 accreditations to the Korean War, there were never to my knowledge more than sixty-odd correspondents actually at the front at any one time, and the average was closer to twenty."