War Stories

Pedelty, Mark

doi:10.4324/9781003100287

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…The credibility deficit usually corresponds to excess credibility attributed to someone in a position of privilege (Longair, 2017: 52). Thus, local media professionals' foreign colleagues/clients linked to big media houses dispose of identity power (Fricker, 2007) that depends upon a shared imaginative construction of the foreign conflict staff reporters as the mythical, heroic, disengaged, nonchalant elite of journalism (e.g., Pedelty, 1995;Peters, 2011). This identity power grants them credibility.…”

Section: Epistemic Injustice or The Fear Of Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This finding comes to the fore in the production of war coverage by international or transnational teams consisting of reporters who are foreign to the context where the war takes place and local media professionals in the role of fixers, producers, consultants, or news assistants. Lately, there has been increased attention paid to the logistical and editorial aspects of the collaboration among these various actors of foreign reporting (e.g., Murrell, 2015;Palmer, 2019) and the dangers and risks that especially the locals face as a result of their work (Baloch and Andresen, 2020;Creech, 2018;Palmer, 2018;Pedelty, 1995;Pendry, 2015). The complexity of these ecosystems of foreign/conflict news production has also become more visible and transparent to the general public due to the evacuations of media fixers from Afghanistan in 2021 (Free Press Unlimited, 2021) and within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since February 2022, especially of the death of Oleksandra Kuvshinova working for Fox News (BBC, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The epistemic injustice in conflict reporting: Reporters and ‘fixers’ covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine

Kotišová

2023

Journalism

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This paper investigates the epistemic injustice in conflict reporting, where foreign parachute reporters collaborate with local producers and ‘fixers.’ Drawing from existing research on ‘fixers’ and other media professionals covering conflict zones and the philosophy of emotion and knowledge, I address the following questions: What is the role of local and foreign media professionals’ affective proximity and professional distance in the social epistemology of conflict news production and the epistemic hierarchy among the collaborators? What implications is this particular social epistemology believed to have for conflict reporting accuracy and ethics? Based on 36 semi-structured to in-depth interviews with foreign and local media professionals covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine and further online and offline contact with the Ukrainian ecosystem of foreign/conflict news production, I argue that the collaboration between foreign and local media professionals is sometimes marked by identity-prejudicial credibility deficit granted to local media professionals because of their affective proximity to the events they cover. This epistemic injustice mirrors other power vectors and the dominant journalistic professional ideology that values disinvolvement, distance, and detachment. In practice, the (local) media professionals’ affective proximity to their contexts is often appreciated as embodied knowledge beneficial to the nuance, accuracy, and ethics of journalistic practices and outcomes.

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Section: Epistemic Injustice or The Fear Of Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The epistemic injustice in conflict reporting: Reporters and ‘fixers’ covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine

Kotišová

2023

Journalism

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“…Doing ethnography in wartime is a fraught practice -as contingent, at times, as the casualty counts I analyze here (De Rond, 2017;Pedelty, 1995). As with the quantification of death in the news, my ethnographic process is troubled by uneven access, emotional attachment, and incomplete understanding.…”

Section: Procedures Of Research: Ethnography In Wartimementioning

confidence: 99%

Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond

Blacksin

2022

Media, War & Conflict

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In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.

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“…Most of the sources quoted were primarily State actors (politicians, government officials, military and police officers, etc. ), in line with normative approaches to covering international crises (Pedelty 1995;Schramm 1959). Although the Sudanese political field was, generally speaking, a key actor in the co-construction process, here too their statements and actions were often evaluated by actors from the global north.…”

Section: Anointing Credible Knowersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making African Suffering Legible: Co-Constructing Narrative of the Darfur Atrocities

Wahutu

2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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Although the last two decades have seen a concerted effort to understand the role and place of African journalism in covering events on the continent, there has been little focus on who journalists chose to quote as sources in their stories. This despite scholarship on sources being vital to our understanding of how journalists gain the “raw materials” to produce stories about events. Thus, while scholarship has begun taking Africa's coverage of itself seriously, there has been a slower uptick in focusing on whom African journalists give voice to as co-constructors of events. This silence is even more perplexing, considering that scholars and observers have been critical of who is quoted as a source when the global north covers events unfolding in Africa. This paper shows that African suffering was made legible for African audiences through a combination of American, English, and Sudanese voices. Specifically, it finds that African journalists are –counterintuitively - vital players in silencing some African voices in their construction of knowledge about the atrocities in Darfur. Despite the criticism leveled at journalism fields in the global north over their perceived silencing of African voices, African journalists are similarly engaged in this silencing as well.

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War Stories

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

The epistemic injustice in conflict reporting: Reporters and ‘fixers’ covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine

The epistemic injustice in conflict reporting: Reporters and ‘fixers’ covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine

Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond

Making African Suffering Legible: Co-Constructing Narrative of the Darfur Atrocities

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