News from the front is almost a quaint idea these days.

The US is at war in a couple of countries, but that's not even top 10 among the issues I see on my Twitter feed or the website of my newspaper.

It was not always thus. News media has been as integral a part of warfare as any other element

since the invention of movable type.

In the newspaper era, dispatches covering troop movements became a complicating element

in the way nation states approached war.

The human costs of war and the repartage thereof

became a sacrosanct element of warfare.

It changed the calculus of how kings and politicians

make the case for war when that cost would come under widespread

scrutiny.

This reached its acme during the Vietnam War when televisions began to bring the vivid reality

of the war into the American living room on a nightly basis.

Reporters genuinely changed the public appetite for that war just by sharing the stories of it,

and it is presumably in the context of watching Vietnam

through the eyes of skeptical reporters that Marie Colvin grew up and formed the core of

her personality. She's the subject of today's biopick, brilliantly inhabited by Roseman Pike, and she was a war

reporter so committed to her mission that she died in Syria just a few years ago, probably

the target of an intentional hit by the

Syrian government because she was exposing the atrocities they were inflicting

on their people. Marie Coleman makes a fascinating focus for a character study. She was a hard-drinking eye-patch-wearing

badass who refused to play by anyone's rules and bravely went right into the teeth of some of the

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