14 War Correspondents Who Risked Their Lives for Press Freedom

Reporting on war is inherently dangerous. Journalists who venture into conflict zones do so with the knowledge that, like the soldiers and civilians involved, they may not make it out alive. Such is the life of a war correspondent.

That life includes the push-pull of press freedom: Reporting from a war zone often means embedding with military units to get close to the front lines. Some governments require review of a reporter’s work as a condition of being embedded with troops. While that tension is difficult for journalists who value their independence, it’s sometimes necessary to show the broader public what goes on in war zones.

In the U.S., the First Amendment and its press freedom clause means the government is limited in its ability to punish journalists for what they report. However, genuine national security concerns are justifications for requiring prior review of work before it’s published and/or punishment. Journalists must be approved by the government to embed with U.S. troops in overseas war zones, such as during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 2000s and 2010s. Once embedded with those troops they could be required to show their work (including photos and video) to military sources to ensure they don’t contain sensitive information about location and tactics.

The First Amendment only applies to actions of the U.S. government. A U.S. journalist reporting in another country is subject to the laws and restrictions of that country’s government.

Discover 14 famous war correspondents from the past century

War correspondents are not hard to find in popular media. They’ve been portrayed in books, films and TV. The 2023 biographical film “Lee” starred Kate Winslet as World War II photojournalist Lee Miller. In 2024, the fictional “Civil War” followed jaded war correspondents used to covering foreign conflicts now reporting on a modern war in their own country: the U.S.

Outside of fictional portrayals, these famous war correspondents did the real work of seeking and reporting truth from conflict zones, at risk to their own safety. In some cases, they died while reporting.

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Christiane Amanpour

Later in her career, Amanpour became chief international anchor for CNN and is now the host of programs bearing her name aired by CNN and PBS. But her work covering conflicts around the world made her one of the most respected war correspondents today. She got her start covering the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s for then newly launched CNN and gained wide attention for her coverage of the early 1990s Persian Gulf and Bosnian Wars. She was CNN’s chief international correspondent from 1992 until 2010.

Ed Bradley (1941-2006)

Bradley started out as a teacher. He did radio DJ and news work for a Philadelphia station before moving to New York City to report for WCBS radio. In 1971, he joined CBS News and reported on the Vietnam War from Saigon, where he said he nearly died in an explosion. Back in the U.S. after the war, he became the network’s first Black correspondent covering the White House. In 1981, he joined the staff of CBS’ news magazine “60 Minutes.” He won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists in 2005, a year before his death from lymphocytic leukemia.

Dickey Chapelle (1919-1965)

Born Georgette Louise Meyer, Chapelle gets her professional name from her ex-husband, Tony Chapelle, and explorer Richard “Dickey” Byrd, whom she admired. She carved her own path as a photographer in New York who ended up working for National Geographic covering World War II. That led to her being posted with U.S. Marines during the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Chapelle continued her photography and writing from war zones in Europe and southeast Asia. She died in 1965 while with U.S. Marines in Vietnam, becoming the first U.S. female war correspondent killed while covering combat.

Kit Coleman (1856-1915)

Born in Ireland as Catherine Ferguson, Coleman immigrated to Canada in 1884 after her first husband died. First working as a house cleaner and magazine writer, she moved to Toronto in 1890 to pursue journalism full time. There her impact on journalism across North America blossomed. As a newspaper columnist, she focused on women’s issues. It was uncommon at the time for women to be assigned hard news stories. But when hard news happened, Coleman saw an opportunity for change. Coleman convinced Mail and Enterprise editors to let her cover the Spanish-American War in Cuba. She “lobbied the United States Secretary of War to become an accredited war correspondent,” becoming the first known North American female journalist to gain that access, thanks in part to her fluency in Spanish. In 1904, she and 14 other women journalists started the Canadian Women’s Press Club, with Coleman as its first president.

Marie Colvin (1956-2012)

A New York native, Colvin’s work is often associated with British journalism given her long career with The Sunday Times of London. She wore an eyepatch after losing an eye in 2001 while covering conflict in Sri Lanka. Colvin became one of the most recognized war reporters of her generation with her deep on-the-ground reporting in conflicts across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Colvin was known for reporting the human impact of war on people living in war zones rather than embedding with troops. “My job is to bear witness,” she once said. “I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village.”

Colvin got into areas other journalists could not or would not go, including to Syria in 2012 during its civil war. She and photojournalist Rémi Ochlik were killed when a media center there was bombed.

Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)

Cronkite is often credited with establishing the idea of an “anchor” for nightly TV news, given his steady presence for 19 years. Before he was anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” he made a name for himself covering World War II, including D-Day, with the wire service United Press (now called UPI). Broadcast news reporter Edward R. Murrow recruited Cronkite to the “Murrow boys” team at CBS to report for radio and the nascent medium of television, but Cronkite initially turned down the offer. It wasn’t until 1950 that Cronkite hit TV screens. He famously broke the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the nation. After a 1968 reporting trip to Vietnam, he famously gave his editorial perspective about the continued U.S. involvement, saying on air, “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

Richard Engel

Engel began his career as many modern war correspondents have, covering the Afghanistan and Iraq wars of the early 2000s. He became NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent in 2008, where he continued covering international conflict, including the Arab Spring of 2011. In 2012, he and five members of his crew were kidnapped in Syria while covering that country’s civil war, escaping five days later. His conflict coverage continued into the 2020s, including the Russia-Ukraine War and Israel-Hamas War. His reporting has garnered numerous awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and multiple Peabody Awards.

Gloria Emerson (1929-2004)

Like many female journalists of her time, Emerson struggled to get recognition as someone able to cover hard news outside of fashion, style and “women’s issues.” Beginning in the1950s, Emerson freelanced for many outlets, including Esquire, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Saturday Review. At The New York Times, she covered the Vietnam War beginning in 1970. Her reporting highlighted false body counts and drug use by U.S. soldiers, and she aimed to show the effects of war on Vietnamese civilians. Her 1976 book “Winners and Losers,” about Vietnam and other topics of her career, won the prestigious National Book Award. In her 1991 book “Gaza: A Year in the Intifada,” Emerson wrote about the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict.

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998)

Gellhorn’s contributions to American journalism during a 60-year career make her one of the most famous war correspondents of the 20th century. She was hired by Collier’s Weekly to cover the Spanish Civil War, where she traveled with novelist Ernest Hemingway (who became her husband) after meeting him in Key West, Florida. In Europe, Gellhorn covered the rise of Adolph Hitler before the U.S. entered World War II, reporting on the war through the invasion of Normandy by Allied troops. She stowed away in a military ship by pretending to be a nurse and is thought to be the only woman to land in France during the D-Day invasion, staying in Europe to report on Allied troops liberating the Dachau concentration camp. She divorced Hemingway and went on to cover world conflicts with The Atlantic Monthly, reporting from Vietnam and on the Israel-Arab conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1999, a year after her death, the Martha Gellhorn Trust established the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in her honor.

Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966)

Women weren’t typically assigned to hard news beats when Marguerite Higgins started her career in 1942 with the New York Herald Tribune. But with many men in the field being drafted into the military, Higgins got to cover World War II, including the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau. That work led her to cover the subsequent Korean War, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, and the early Vietnam War. In Vietnam, she contracted a parasitic disease that led to her death. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Tim Hetherington & Chris Hondros (both 1970-2011)

Photojournalists Hetherington and Hondros are linked together in the tragic circumstance of their deaths. They died in a bomb attack in 2011 while covering the Libyan civil war. They were two of the top photojournalists in the world covering war and skirmishes. Hondros, who worked for Getty Images, was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in photography. Hetherington freelanced for multiple outlets, including Vanity Fair, where he and fellow journalist Sebastian Junger covered the Afghanistan War in 2008 and 2009. Junger and Hetherington turned that reporting into the documentary film “Restrepo,” which won the top documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 and was nominated for an Academy Award. Hetherington won the 2008 World Press Photo of the Year for his Afghanistan coverage.

Ernie Pyle (1900-1945)

If there were a Mount Rushmore of war correspondents, Pyle may hold the George Washington spot as the most remembered. His embedded dispatches from the trenches of World War II in the European and Pacific theaters earned him the reputation as “the voice of the American soldier.” While embedded with U.S. troops, he wrote a weekly column syndicated to hundreds of U.S. newspapers, writing about the harsh realities of war and profiling the soldiers fighting it. He was shot and killed while reporting from the Pacific theater on the small island of Iejima near Okinawa. His alma mater Indiana University, where he worked on the campus newspaper, remembers him with a building named in his honor that previously housed the school’s newspaper. A statue outside the university’s newer Media School building depicts him at a small desk using a typewriter to file his war correspondence from the field.

Ollie Stewart (1906-1977)

Like Ernie Pyle, Stewart saw World War II action up close. But unlike Pyle, Stewart is not as well known, though they overlapped as correspondents and knew each other. Stewart wrote for the widely distributed The Afro-American newspaper, a U.S. publication, beginning in 1934. He became the first Black reporter credentialed by the U.S. War Department to report and send back dispatches from the European and North African theaters. Remaining in Paris after the war, he continued to file stories for U.S. audiences until shortly before his death more than 30 years later.

Scott A. Leadingham is a Freedom Forum staff writer. Email / Bluesky