Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists who Covered It

“A searing document, one of the most revealing chronicles of the war yet published. It is as though correspondents are talking late into the night, trying to explain what it was like, what sights and smells haunt them, what they’re proud of and what they regret, what they saw coming and what they didn’t.”
—Anthony Swofford, The Washington Post

“Never in the fifty years that I have been in or around the news business have I read a better record of a historic event than this.”
—Reese Schonfeld, founding president of CNN

“This should be required reading in every journalism class from high school to graduate school.”
—James W. Crawley, president of Military Reporters and Editors

Following in the footsteps of best-selling books about the war, Reporting Iraq is a fully illustrated narrative history of the war by the world’s best-known reporters and photojournalists. Included are contributions from fifty journalists, including Dexter Filkins (the New York Times correspondent who won widespread praise for his coverage of Fallujah), Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City), Anthony Shadid (the Washington Post reporter awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq reporting), and Patrick Cockburn (from London’s Independent).

In this, the first book to tell the history of the war through the end of 2006, the deadliest period of conflict, we learn that most journalists saw a disaster in Iraq before they were allowed to report it. This revelation, along with hundreds of untold first-person stories, makes Reporting Iraq a fascinating look at the war and an important critique of international press coverage.

Reporting Iraq is published in conjunction with the Columbia Journalism Review, America’s premier media monitor and watchdog of the press in all its forms, from newspapers and magazines to radio, television, wire services, and the web.