Traveling with American troops in World War II, the war correspondent Ernie Pyle brought home the horror in unadorned prose.

''There is nothing left behind but the remains -- the lifeless debris, the sunshine and the flowers, and utter silence,'' he wrote from Normandy in 1944. ''An amateur who wanders in this vacuum at the rear of a battle has a terrible sense of loneliness. Everything is dead -- the men, the machines, the animals -- and you alone are left alive.''

Pyle himself was killed in action and mourned as a hero.

Combat journalism has changed since then, but so has warfare. Technology has significantly altered how wars are waged and for how long, the tools reporters use and how audiences receive the news.

Edward R. Murrow, standing on rooftops in London watching German bombs fall, sent word pictures by radio; today's television correspondents transmit live images. Now there are multitudes of channels, as well as the Internet, barraging the home front with information and supposition, some of it reliable, some not. But has this made war more comprehensible or less? Is the war correspondence any better?

Listening to old Murrow broadcasts is a reminder that war has always been a chaotic, confusing and dangerous story, seen by the reporter through a narrow lens. Murrow brought clarity to his listeners through intelligent assessment of what he saw.

''A row of automobiles, with stretchers racked on the roof like skis, standing outside of bombed buildings,'' he said in 1940, describing the bombing of London. ''A man pinned under wreckage where a broken gas main sears his arms and face.''

Today's television broadcasts unfold not like narratives, edited for sense, context and continuity, but like animated Cubist paintings with sound and multiple images appearing simultaneously.

''Back in the Middle Ages when I covered wars you had reflection time -- you weren't winging it,'' said Morley Safer of CBS's ''60 Minutes,'' who covered the Israeli-Egyptian conflict in Suez in 1956 and the Vietnam War in the 1960's. ''Now, suddenly you're on, and you have to say something. You can only describe what you can see in the very, very narrow field of vision that you have. They have a hell of a lot more people covering these live wars than we had. But we had time to check things out.''

A Keyhole View

In all wars the field correspondents by necessity offer a keyhole view, its range determined by access and censorship. Pyle, like other correspondents in World War II, was required to submit dispatches to military censors, while today's reporters are not (although the reporters traveling with troops are subject to restrictions).

But the context of World War II -- a global war with a moral imperative against a clear enemy, where the reporter and the soldier were both unlikely to question the rationale -- fell apart quickly in Vietnam. The conflict produced widespread dissent at home and changed the perspective and even the role of the war reporter. Skepticism replaced solidarity, and reporters made their reputations by digging out the contradictions of the war, not by making heroes out of the combatants.

In the Iraq war, the Pentagon's policy of assigning journalists to live with the troops, or ''embedding'' them, could be seen as carrying on the tradition of Ernie Pyle -- or as a method to manage the news and restore the sympathy between reporter and soldier.

The policy, some critics argue, is an effort by the Pentagon to ''weaponize'' the press, to make it a cheerleader again for American soldiers and to demoralize an enemy with live pictures of American might.

Civilian correspondents first began reporting on war during the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856. War reporters have been cheerleaders and mythmakers as well as provocateurs and skeptics, depending on how they use their positions as the public's main intermediary between official statements and what they see for themselves.

In World War II, and the Spanish Civil War before it, war reporting became the stuff of legend and literature for writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, as well as for journalists like Murrow and Pyle. That tradition continued into Vietnam, which became the proving ground for a generation of American writers.

Being a war correspondent has been difficult and dangerous but also romantic, and romanticized. Michael Herr, in ''Dispatches,'' a book drawn from his Vietnam reporting for Esquire magazine, wrote of the press corps reporting on the war, ''It included young marrieds, all kinds of girl reporters, a lot of Europeans, the Ivy-League-in-Asia crowd, the Danang bunch, the Straights and the Heads, formals and funkies, old hands (many of whom were very young) and even some tourists, people who wanted to go somewhere to screw around for a while and happened to choose the war.''

A similar variety has gathered now: the veterans of other wars, the gonzo adventurers and the gee-whiz commentators who seem surprised to be seeing bombs explode. It is too early to tell what kind of job they are doing. But as in other wars, death is an occupational hazard. Four journalists have died -- two Britons, an Australian and, on Thursday, Michael Kelly, the editor-at-large for The Atlantic Monthly and a columnist for The Washington Post. He was a former reporter for The New York Times.

Shaping the News