Markham, Tim (2010) War reporting in the 21st century: a political phenomenological perspective on pooling, embedding, ICTs and citizen journalism. In: International Communication Association Annual Conference, 2010, Singapore. (Unpublished)
Abstract
This paper draws on a discourse analysis of interviews with British and American war reporters and otherswith a stake in the field of war reporting, conceived in the Bourdieusian sense, in order to ask how this journalistic genre has been affected by recent changes in military media management strategies anddevelopments in information and communication technologies (ICTs). It takes a political phenomenological perspective, focussing on the collective factors which structure an individual’sconscious experience of professional cultural production, and the relations of power in which this issituated. This approach re-interprets themes such as professional identity, news values and journalisticethics as cultures of practice. Such practices are properly characterized as strategic – not in the sense thatthey are cynically deployed by war reporters for personal gain, but because their normalization as part of the taken-for-granted world of the journalist is located within a broader symbolic economy through whichdifferent groups of actors vie for authority and status. Previous work by the author identified two suchcultures of practice, one concerning the esotericization of what constitutes high quality war reporting, andthe other concerning a reporter’s self-positioning in relation to the journalistic object (and to peers)through invocations of ambivalence towards power and risk. These underpin a collectively recognizedform of authority in the field which is highly individualized, irreverent towards power and guileful.However, fields are not static, and this paper investigates whether the world that war reporters inhabit is being transformed by three factors: the increasing prevalence of pooling and embedding, the increasingavailability of portable communications to journalists and soldiers alike, and the rise of citizen journalism.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC) (Closed) |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Sep 2013 09:39 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:07 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/8191 |
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