We all suffered a loss with the murder of Daniel Pearl – his family, his newspaper, his journalistic colleagues and the reading public. His wife, pregnant, learned the worst after making eloquent appeals for his release through an agonizing month. The Wall Street Journal tried its best to get him freed and then published a moving tribute to one of its star reporters. His colleagues mourn Mr. Pearl’s death and ask themselves about their own vulnerability. For the rest of us, the reading public, the loss is less direct but nonetheless telling.

War is always chaotic, full of uncertainty about motives, strategies and the details of what actually is happening. The current vogue term is “the fog of war.” A book published in the 1920s, Arthur Ponsonby’s “Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War,” put a finer point on the matter. Even the United States turns to lying sometimes, as was suggested recently in a leaked Pentagon plan for a new “influence” project said to include “disinformation.” Another type of wartime fog involves secrecy, which protects national security, of course, but also serves to conceal military blunders.

Penetrating the fog is dangerous work. Mr. Pearl was the 10th journalist to die in the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 37 who died doing their jobs in 2001. It says another 118 were imprisoned and more than 600 were physically attacked.

Reporters and photographers once assumed that they were given a sort of immunity and were accepted as nonbelligerent, impartial observers. Now, news and information have become weapons of war, and their bearers have become targets.

Why would Daniel Pearl and other news people take such a risky job? Part of the reason is undoubtedly the challenge and excitement of chasing down a story. But the basic answer is that their line of work is gathering news, and a war is always a big story. They know that they must go into danger. They know that they must ask dangerous questions. They know that they must sometimes trust strangers. They know that they must trust to luck and that luck sometimes runs out.

Are members of the press corps completely unbiased? Of course not. In the final stages of the war in Vietnam, most reporters believed that, if it ever was justified, it had become a lost cause. In the present war on terrorism, most of them probably sympathize with U.S. objectives and operations. But in any conflict, their job is not to express their opinions but to learn the truth and get it into print or on the air. Without such an information force, the public would be stuck with trying to learn the facts from official briefings and communiqu?s. In this war, that means outlandish falsehood from the other side. On the U.S. side, officials can be expected to minimize any failures and remain cautious and elliptical in disclosing, say, incidents of mistaken targets and American casualties from “friendly fire.”

War is bad enough with brave and curious journalists like Daniel Pearl on the scene. Without them, it would be a lot worse.