Interview…with journalist W. Thomas Smith, Jr.

Ed. Note: updated and corrected 5/2/08


Being the subject of a story wasn't something that combat journalist W. Thomas Smith, Jr. wanted, but at the beginning of December 2007, he found himself in the middle of a media war with his professional and personal ethics under fire.

It is not unusual for a journalist of Smith's stature to be publicly attacked. He writes about dangerous people and explosive issues in a politically charged world for national and international publications. He is accustomed to controversy swirling around him, but normally there would be a shadow of truth and this attack targeted areas around which he builds his daily life: honor and integrity.

"Frankly, I would rather have been accused of murdering somebody or robbing a bank," Smith says about the accusations published in The Huffington Post, an online blogging site, on December 1, 2007.

In short, political editor Thomas B. Edsall's article questioned the veracity of items Smith had written in the National Review Online (NRO) blog "The Tank" while in Lebanon for three weeks in September and October. Edsall accused him of exaggerating or outright lying in his reports of Hezbollah activities in Beirut and other areas of the country. The story was picked up and spread throughout the Internet and found its way into the mainstream media. There was little Smith could do.

"I was writing about sensitive things," he explains, "that were in many ways unverifiable, for many reasons," including to protect his sources, many of whom are highly placed in the Lebanese military and the government. Eventually, he and other experts on Lebanon and counterterrorism debunked all the accusations from Edsall and the journalists quoted in the article, but unlike the initial story, the follow up has yet to light up cyberspace.

How did Smith find himself reporting from war-torn Lebanon?

He has a long family tradition of military service. The men in his family have always served their country. Smith would not break that mold, and after graduating from the University of South Carolina, he joined the US Marine Corps, serving four years in the mid-1980s. It was this tradition and his life-long love of writing that led Smith to combat reporting.

Smith at Camp Pendleton, CA - 1983

Lebanon was only his latest hot spot. He was on assignment for NRO. He has reported from war zones across the Middle East and beyond. His first assignment was in 1995, covering the last days of the Bosnian War for a small weekly newspaper in South Carolina. He has also reported from the West Bank and Iraq, and in 2001, writing for the US News & World Report and other publications, Smith had the opportunity to do something no journalist has done in nearly 150 years: report from an American battlefield - Manhattan on September 11.

" I will always say that the one-dimensional images we’ve all seen on television do not begin to convey the scope of the destruction and just how horrible it was." Ground Zero was one of the worst battlefields he had seen to that point, but he continues to go into combat zones.

"War itself is the story," he explains, "In fact, in the history of the printed press, it is the biggest of all stories. (It) consistently outranks other stories in terms of what readers, writers, and editors deem to be important."

Are war stories the only thing Smith writes?


Smith has been an editor of a business magazine and an adjunct faculty member at the USC School of Journalism and Mass Communications, but yes, his primary focus is on the military and national defense. He has published hundreds of articles in nearly three dozen magazines, newspapers and online publications, such as USA Today, Washington Times, Business Week, The Guardian, Townhall.com, Military.com and others. His six books include The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pirates, The Korean Conflict and American Airborne Forces. He has contributed to A Nation Changed, a book commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11, to Faces of Freedom, and to Sixty Candles: Reflections on the Writing Life by members of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Smith is often sought as an editor, consultant or technical advisor on various other projects, including three current book projects and a five-part television documentary series on the Military Channel. He has coached writers individually and taught at writer's conferences and workshops. He lectures to a variety of groups from Fortune 500 companies to the US Armed Forces.

How has the Lebanon blogging controversy affected him?

Professionally, he has seen little affect. Smith believes most of the editors he works with know what happened and how it was engineered, possibly by Hezbollah operatives directly. So his professional relationships have been virtually unaffected.


"Surprisingly to me, my business is far better than it was before...and it was good then."

Personally, the attacks left marks.

"It hurt me. It was and is incredibly difficult on many levels for myself and my family," he says. "Primarily because the attacks against me and my work were based on absolute falsehoods and fabrications."

In a statement on his website, Smith says,"…what I wrote about and had published was not packaged as thoroughly and airtight as it would have been in a regular article." He inadvertently left holes that his detractors have exploited. As a result, in all his writing, even informal blog writing, he strives to be "crystal clear" and "airtight." Nothing is informal now. That caution carried over to his communications for this interview, not necessarily distrust, but he did measure his words carefully when answering questions.

In spite of everything, Smith has not and will not shy away from the dangerous or the controversial and he will continue to seek out battlefields and front lines.

"It’s what I do. It’s who I am, whether or not I want to be…which, by the way, I do."




If you'd like to learn more about W. Thomas Smith, Jr., visit his website.