Reporting Conflict

Introducing a compelling new series that offers leading international thinking on conflict and peacebuilding. Journalists control our access to news. By pitching stories from particular angles, the media decides the issues for public debate.

As the second book in the Routledge Journalism Insights series, this edited collection explores the possibilities and challenges involved in contemporary reporting of peace and conflict. Featuring 16 expert contributing authors, the collection maps the field of peace and conflict reporting in a digital world, in a context where the financial prospects of the news industry are challenged and professional authority, credibility and autonomy are decaying. The contributors, ranging from prominent scholars to the Head of Newsgathering at the BBC, discuss a diverse range of key case studies, including the role of Bellingcat in conflict journalism; war and peace journalism in Bangladesh; visual storytelling in conflict zones; and rampant cyber-misogyny confronting women journalists in Finland, India, the Philippines and South Africa. Bringing together theory and practice, the collection offers an in-depth examination of the changes taking place in the working practices of journalists as ongoing, strategic assaults against them increase. Insights on Peace and Conflict Reporting is a powerful resource for students and academics in the fields of global journalism, foreign news reporting, conflict reporting, globalisation, media and international communication.

A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict constructs an argument from first principles to identify what constitutes good journalism. It explores and synthesises key concepts from political and communication theory to delineate the role of journalism in public spheres. And it shows how these concepts relate to ideas from peace research, in the form of Peace Journalism. Thinkers whose contributions are examined along the way include Michel Foucault, Johan Galtung, John Paul Lederach, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manuel Castells and Jurgen Habermas. The book argues for a critical realist approach, considering critiques of ‘correspondence’ theories of representation to propose an innovative conceptualisation of journalistic epistemology in which ‘social truths’ can be identified as the basis for the journalistic remit of factual reporting. If the world cannot be accessed as it is, then it can be assembled as agreed – so long as consensus on important meanings is kept under constant review. These propositions are tested by extensive fieldwork in four countries: Australia, the Philippines, South Africa and Mexico.

Introduction -- Risk and war journalism -- Bearing witness: morality, risk and war reporting -- Organisational and occupational risks and war reporting -- Technology and risk management: telegraph, telex and Twitter -- Media on the battlefield: risk and embedding -- Asymmetrical wars: reporting post war Iraq -- Risk and reporting new forms of conflict -- Covering victims, casualties and death -- Gender, risk and war reporting

In Reporting Conflict, a correspondent turned lecturer draws on his personal experience of journalism in wartime. The author, James Rodgers, has reported on world-changing conflicts. The book combines reflection on this personal experience with an assessment of other accounts of journalism in wartime, and academic studies on the subject.

This book examines journalistic strategies in terms of the appropriation of media logics in the conflict frame-building process. Relying on three models (objectivity, mediatisation and news framing), it interrogates the role orientations and performance of journalists who reported the conflict involving the ‘indigenous’ Christians and Hausa Fulani Muslim ‘settlers’ of Jos, a city in North Central Nigeria inhabited by approximately one million people. The book provides empirical evidence of the strategies and the representations of ethnic and religious identities in the conflict narratives focusing on the most-cited and vicious conflicts in Jos which occurred in 2001, 2008 and 2010. Thus, mediatised conflict research is revisited, placing media logics at the heart of the conflict. The text proposes Solutions-Review Journalism (SRJ) as a framework for conflict reporting, and argues that a review process is necessary to measure impact.

`No book is more timely than this collection, which analyses brilliantly the Western media's relentless absorption into the designs of dominant, rapacious power' - John Pilger This book examines the changing contours of media coverage of war and considers the relationship between mass media and governments in wartime.

This book explores the impact of new forms of online reporting on the BBC’s coverage of war and terrorism. Informed by the views of over 100 BBC staff at all levels of the corporation, Bennett captures journalists’ shifting attitudes towards blogs and internet sources used to cover wars and other conflicts. He argues that the BBC’s practices and values are fundamentally evolving in response to the challenges of immediate digital publication. Ongoing challenges for journalism in the online media environment are identified: maintaining impartiality in the face of calls for more open personal journalism; ensuring accuracy when the power of the "former audience" allows news to break at speed; and overcoming the limits of the scale of the BBC’s news operation in order to meet the demands to present news as conversation. While the focus of the book is on the BBC’s coverage of war and terrorism, the conclusions are more widely relevant to the evolving practice of journalism at traditional media organizations as they grapple with a revolution in publication.