The Journalistic Value of Emerging Technologies

This article examines modern American warfare and policing to draw parallels in the ways that national citizens and foreign nationals are subjected to similar regimes of violence and subjugation and highlight the interrelated oppressions of marginalized groups at home with marginalized groups abroad. It analyzes media representations of people from the Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (menasa) regions to further demonstrate the workings of empire. In particular, the us military-industrial complex, in conjunction with the us media industry, has played a pivotal role in creating dangerous post-9/11 stereotypes of menasa people as ruthless terrorists. Simultaneously, the us media fabricate an organic alliance between African Americans and its security state apparatus, thereby creating discord and disunity between African Americans and Arabs and other Muslim Americans. Against the hegemony of these institutions, how can activists create spectatorial solidarity and unified movements?

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Bearing the cost to witness: the political economy of risk in contemporary conflict and war reporting

Creech

2017

Media, Culture & Society

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As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – that is, true bodily harm – has become a normalized condition for those reporting from conflict zones. This article considers the political economy of risk, paying particular attention to the ways it has been constructed as a desirable and manageable condition for various classes of news workers. The burden of risk is distributed unequally across staff reporters, freelancers, and non-Western local journalists of all stripes, and a persistent discourse of witnessing obscures both these inequities and the structural conditions that allow news organizations to profit from an increased assumption of individual risk. As structural conditions, individual mitigations, and practices of textual commodification are considered and critiqued, the article concludes by identifying specific strategies that push beyond an economic logic, and thus reassert the cultural and political value of conflict and war reporting as a practice that merits protection, regardless of who produces it. Such a critique focuses on developing the discursive tools that allow journalists and outside observers alike to ask ‘who should bear the costs of witnessing?’

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The Journalistic Value of Emerging Technologies

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Form and Function: The Importance of Military Formations in Cinematic Depictions of the Roman Army

Form and Function: The Importance of Military Formations in Cinematic Depictions of the Roman Army

Racialized Agents and Villains of the Security State: How African Americans are Interpellated against Muslims and Muslim Americans

Bearing the cost to witness: the political economy of risk in contemporary conflict and war reporting

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