As the ‘Forever War’ Drags On, Veterans Bring Battlefield Knowledge to the Newsroom

In March 2018, The War Horse was featured by Columbia Journalism Review for our team’s work addressing the decline in military coverage at for-profit and non-profit media organizations.

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“After more than a decade of constant war, the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs have ballooned into two of the largest departments in the US government, commanding over 60 percent of Congress’s discretionary spending in the 2018 budget. Newspaper budgets, unfortunately, didn’t balloon with them, and right now, political drama is far more likely to make the front page than anything to do with the military. “Obsessed with the seemingly daily updates in the Stormy Daniels story or the impeachment potential of the Russia investigation, the American media is paying even less attention now to a topic it never focused on with much zeal,” Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post this weekend, referring to a lack of coverage of civilian deaths in the Middle East.”

Read more at CJR about how The War Horse is educating the public on military service, war, and its impact.

Thomas J. Brennan

Thomas is the founder and executive director of The War Horse. He served as an infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan before studying investigative reporting at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. His reporting has appeared in Vanity Fair, Center for Investigative Reporting, and on the front page of The New York Times. Thomas has held fellowships at the Center for a New American Security, The Atlantic Council, and The George W. Bush Institute. Thomas's feature writing has been awarded by the Society for Features Journalism and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. His investigative reporting has earned him both a national and regional Edward R. Murrow, two Fourth Estate Awards, and the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. He can be reached at thomas@thewarhorse.org.

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