‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria

Abstract

Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely professional discursive pursuit. I explain affective proximity in terms of an imagined space (or the lack thereof) between a media practitioner, on the one hand, and the event they are representing and participating in, on the other. In relation to Syria, I use it to analyse the word ‘revolution’ and what it mediates, the shifting boundaries between activism and journalism, and experiences of, and in, violence. I make the case that the study of affect and emotion in global news should be contextualized within the unequal power relations that give shape to journalistic roles and modes of representaiton.

See the Responsibilities of Professional News Agencies and NGOs in The Networked Digital Age Through the Xinjiang Cotton Campaign of China

“…The power of emotion has a significant function in attracting the public's attention to the notice-worthy stories. According to the recent study of Omar AI-Ghazzi, the life-risking and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in the understanding of journalism when it is conceived as a purely professional discursive pursuit [11]. This means many on-the-spot journalists, especially the war correspondents and human rights reporters, have no choice to distance the emotion and become activists in the events.…”

Flesh witnessing: Smartphones, UGC and embodied testimony

“…In this special issue, we explore UGC precisely as a practice of existential self-assertion, where bodies-at-risk use their smartphones to testify and speak out on the violence and suffering they and others like them face in their everyday lives – what we below define as “flesh witnessing”. Such acts of testimony have already been theorized in terms of creating new spaces of visibility for distant suffering (Chouliaraki, 2013; 2015, Tait, 2011); transforming news-making and its photojournalistic routines (Mortensen, 2015; Zelizer, 2010) and journalists’ rights and responsibilities (Cooper, 2017), particularly in contexts of diffused war (Hoskins and o’Loughlin, 2010) but also with regard to holding perpetrators accountable in the global public sphere (Ristovska, 2016); the empowering and disempowering of local citizen reporters maneuvering in the global media circuit (Al-Ghazzi, 2021; Mollerup and Mortensen, 2020); or creating new moral subjectivities in liberal politics (Givoni, 2014). Yet few studies have so far focused on the “flesh” dimension of such testimonies or problematized their moral and political uses as evidence of atrocity, sources of memory and tools of information, propaganda or even terrorism.…”

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“…The emotional labour of journalists involves managing a variety of pressures, both professional and personal (Kotisova, 2019). This labour, and its study, are complicated by the dominant understandings of the journalistic profession which are based on ‘the suppression of personal, emotional identity for the sake of an ideologically driven, detached professional self’ (Hopper and Huxford, 2015 cited in Kotisova, 2019: 6; see also, Al-Ghazzi, 2021). The relationship between emotional lifeworlds of journalists and precarity as a function of changing labour regimes is most clear in studies on trauma and psychological and physical wellbeing of journalists (Creech, 2018).…”