Risky Assignments

Rentschler, Carrie A.

doi:10.1080/14680770701477875

Cited by 29 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The author's main criticism of the documents analysed, however, is not on the training contents per se, but the masculinised and securitised form of presentation in training documents. She emphasises the "culture of risk awareness" addressed by the General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists' 2003 training manual titled Live News: A Survival Guide for Journalists (cited in Rentschler, 2007):…”

Section: Theory On Journalist Safety Training and Manualsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering Journalist Safety Training

Høiby

Garrido

2020

MaC

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Safety training courses and manuals are designed to provide journalists with guidance to assess and mitigate risk. In this article, we ask whether content of such training and guidance is informed by actual threats and risks relevant to journalists working in the field. Departing from our own previous research about threats and dangers faced by journalists working in conflict zones or covering dangerous beats, and a review of the literature addressing the issue of safety manuals for journalists, we evaluate the content of five safety-training documents. Of these, two are descriptions of internationally-focused safety courses, two are safety manuals produced for a national audience, and one is a handbook focusing specifically on safety for women reporters in the Arab region. The purpose is to identify various aspects of safety addressed in training and manuals offered to locally and internationally-deployed journalists—and illuminate how they may differ in focus and approach. Through a comparison of the content of the selected manuals and course descriptions, we conclude that these trainings and manuals to some extent address specific variations in context, but that detailed attention towards gender differences in risk and other personal characteristics are not given equivalent weight. The international training focuses excessively on physical environment issues (such as those of a ‘hostile environment’), while the manuals with national or regional focus are practice-oriented and largely take a journalistic point of departure. We argue that training and manuals can benefit from considering both these aspects for risk assessment, but recommend that addressing journalistic practice and personal resources is fundamental to all journalist safety training since it is at the personal, practical, and media organisational levels that the mitigation encouraged by these trainings can happen.

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Section: Theory On Journalist Safety Training and Manualsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering Journalist Safety Training

Høiby

Garrido

2020

MaC

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“…Whether heading off to cover the Spanish-American War (Moeller, 1989) or the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries (Hilsum, 2019; Tumber and Webster, 2006), the idea of journalism in general, and conflict journalism in particular, having emotional dimensions is generally taken for granted by journalists and researchers of journalism alike. As a specific topic of enquiry, though, the role that emotion serves in the practical work of such journalists has remained a peripheral concern to other interests, such as the economics of foreign reporting (Hamilton et al, 2004; Hoffman, 2003; Scott et al, 2019), risk and safety culture in journalism (Palmer, 2015; Rentschler, 2007) and the role of fixers in the production of news (Murrell, 2010, 2019; Palmer, 2018, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tumber and Webster (2006: 116), for example, have pointed to a range of emotions in the work of war reporting that include fear, anxiety and excitement. That the emotional life of the professional conflict reporter can include anxiety, excitement and even regret is sufficiently repeated in both the academic literature (McLaughlin, 2016; Rentschler, 2007; Thompson, 2019; Tumber and Webster, 2006) and the biographies of journalists (Hilsum, 2019; Huffman, 2013; Marinovich and Da Silva, 2001) that it has become cliché to point it out explicitly.…”

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confidence: 99%

Feeling responsible: Emotion and practical ethics in conflict journalism

Stupart

2021

Media, War & Conflict

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This article examines the role of emotion in the practices of journalists reporting on conflict and its effects in South Sudan, based on a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations of the working routines of journalists from Nairobi, Kampala and Juba. Contrary to perceptions of emotion as an akratic failure to reason in a rational, detached manner, obligations felt to people and situations can be understood as rational, information-bearing guides to action, directing journalists to consider personal ethical norms that may sit in tension with the norms of their professional roles as they understand them. The presence of such feelings in the case of journalists committed to a norm of emotional detachment in their work points to the moral incoherence of norms of detachment in (at least) journalism of this type.

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“…With this in mind, it is our aim to imagine different memorialisations in which the structures that lead to the death of journalists, such as a precarious and neoliberal ordered news economy (Rentschler, 2007) and the mixture of the practices of media and conflict (Korf et al, 2010) are more prominently part of the picture. In this way, we hope to move on to a different description of the field which better reflects commitments to ending the exploitation of those engaged in this form of reporting.…”

Section: Three Shifts In Conflict Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friends like these: A shift in labour, security and the normative ideals of conflict journalism

Sharp,

Stupart

2023

International Communication Gazette

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This paper draws on previous work in the fields of conflict studies and journalism studies, as well as empirical work by the authors on the normative language of conflict journalism to argue that this subfield of journalism appears to have increasingly ‘moved house’ from the normative universe of institutional journalism to that of professional humanitarianism. We describe three shifts that are taking (or have taken) place whose effects may include a transformation of ideas around ‘what conflict journalism is for’ and how it understands its presence in armed conflict.

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Risky Assignments

Cited by 29 publications

References 27 publications

Reconsidering Journalist Safety Training

Reconsidering Journalist Safety Training

Feeling responsible: Emotion and practical ethics in conflict journalism

Friends like these: A shift in labour, security and the normative ideals of conflict journalism

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