War Reporters Under Threat describes the threat of violence facing war reporters from the United States government and some of its closest allies. Chris Paterson argues that what should have been the lesson for the press following the invasion of Iraq – that they will be treated instrumentally by the US government – has been mostly ignored. As a result, even nominally democratic states cannot be counted upon to protect journalists in conflict, and urgent reform of legal protections for journalists is required. War Reporters Under Threat combines critical scholarship with original investigation to assess the impact of the US governments obsession with information control and protection of its own troops. While the press-military relationship has been well researched, this book is the first to elaborate the US government threat to journalists, a threat usually dismissed by the global journalism industry.
The War Correspondent looks at the role of the war reporter today: the attractions and the risks of the job; the challenge of objectivity and impartiality in the war zone; the danger of journalistic independence being compromised by military control, censorship, and public relations; as well as the commercial and technological pressures of an intensely concentrated, competitive news media environment. This new edition substantially updates the original, ending with an extended section on the return of history and ideology to the reporting of international conflict, and interviews with prominent war and foreign correspondents including John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Mary Dvesky, and Alex Thomson.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Finalist for the Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Named a Best Book of 2018 by Esquire and Foreign Policy. An Amazon Best Book of November, the Guardian Bookshop Book of November, and one of the Evening Standard's Books to Read in November "Now, thanks to Hilsum’s deeply reported and passionately written book, [Marie Colvin] has the full accounting that she deserves." --Joshua Hammer, The New York Times The inspiring and devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed in Syria in 2012, and whose life story also forms the basis of the feature film A Private War, starring Rosamund Pike as Colvin. When Marie Colvin was killed in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012, at age fifty-six, the world lost a fearless and iconoclastic war correspondent who covered the most significant global calamities of her lifetime. In Extremis, written by her fellow reporter Lindsey Hilsum, is a thrilling investigation into Colvin’s epic life and tragic death based on exclusive access to her intimate diaries from age thirteen to her death, interviews with people from every corner of her life, and impeccable research. After growing up in a middle-class Catholic family on Long Island, Colvin studied with the legendary journalist John Hersey at Yale, and eventually started working for The Sunday Times of London, where she gained a reputation for bravery and compassion as she told the stories of victims of the major conflicts of our time. She lost sight in one eye while in Sri Lanka covering the civil war, interviewed Gaddafi and Arafat many times, and repeatedly risked her life covering conflicts in Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, and the Middle East. Colvin lived her personal life in extremis, too: bold, driven, and complex, she was married twice, took many lovers, drank and smoked, and rejected society’s expectations for women. Despite PTSD, she refused to give up reporting. Like her hero Martha Gellhorn, Colvin was committed to bearing witness to the horrifying truths of war, and to shining a light on the profound suffering of ordinary people caught in the midst of conflict. Lindsey Hilsum’s In Extremis is a devastating and revelatory biography of one of the greatest war correspondents of her generation.
Is journalism under threat? Censorship, political pressure, intimidation, job insecurity and attacks on the protection of journalists’ sources - how can these threats be tackled?Journalism at Risk is a new book from the Council of Europe, in which ten experts from different backgrounds examine the role of journalism in democratic societies. Is journalism under threat? The image of journalists, as helmeted war correspondents protected by bullet-proof vests and armed only with cameras and microphones, springs to mind. Physical threats are only the most visible dangers, however. Journalists and journalism itself are facing other threats such as censorship, political and economic pressure, intimidation, job insecurity and attacks on the protection of journalists’ sources. Social media and digital photography mean that anyone can now publish information, which is also upsetting the ethics of journalism. How can these threats be tackled? What is the role of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and national governments in protecting journalists and freedom of expression? In this book, 10 experts from different backgrounds analyse the situation from various angles. At a time when high-quality, independent journalism is more necessary than ever – and yet when the profession is facing many different challenges – they explore the issues surrounding the role of journalism in democratic societies.
Reporting War and Conflict brings together history, theory and practice to explore the issues and obstacles involved in the reporting of contemporary war and conflict. The book examines the radical changes taking place in the working practices and day-to-day routines of war journalists, arguing that managing risk has become central to modern war correspondence. How individual reporters and news organisations organise their coverage of war and conflict is increasingly shaped by a variety of personal, professional and institutional risks. The book provides an historical and theoretical context to risk culture and the work of war correspondents, paying particular attention to the changing nature of technology, organisational structures and the role of witnessing. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are examined to highlight how risk and the calculations of risk vary according to the type of conflict. The focus is on the relationship between propaganda, censorship, the sourcing of information and the challenges of reporting war in the digital world. The authors then move on to discuss the arguments around risk in relation to gender and war reporting and the coverage of death on the battlefield. Reporting War and Conflict is a guide to the contemporary changes in warfare and the media environment that have influenced war reporting. It offers students and researchers in journalism and media studies an invaluable overview of the life of a modern war correspondent.
More journalists are being killed, attacked and intimidated than at any time in history. Reporting Dangerously: Journalist Killings, Intimidation and Security examines the statistics and looks at the trends in journalist killings and intimidation around the world. It identifies what factors have led to this rise and positions these in historical and global contexts. This important study also provides case studies and first-hand accounts from journalists working in some of the most dangerous places in the world today and seeks to understand the different pressures they must confront. It also examines industry and political responses to these trends and pressures as well as the latest international initiatives aimed at challenging cultures of impunity and keeping journalists safe. Throughout, the authors argue that journalism contributes a vital if often neglected role in the formation and conduct of civil societies. This is why reporting from ‘uncivil’ places matters and this is why journalists are often positioned in harm’s way. The responsibility to report in a globalizing world of crises and human insecurity, and the responsibility to try and keep journalists safe while they do so, it is argued, belongs to us all.
Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed. Each of this book's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today. Special attention is devoted to recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war, and issues discussed, amongst many, include: the influence of censorship and propaganda 'us' and 'them' news narratives access to sources '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect' military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage') 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters tensions between objectivity and patriotism. The book raises important questions about the very future of journalism during wartime, questions which demand public dialogue and debate, and is essential reading for students taking courses in news and news journalism, as well as for researchers, teachers and practitioners in the field.
Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection, with a foreword by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour “A stirring, provocative and well-made new anthology . . . that rewrites the hoary rules of the foreign correspondent playbook, deactivating the old clichés.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat—female journalists—are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. From sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of traveling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique—as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or with men on Whatsapp who will go on to become ISIS fighters, rebels, or pro-regime soldiers. In Our Women on the Ground, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it’s like to report on conflicts that (quite literally) hit close to home. Their daring and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about the region’s women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is frequently misunderstood. INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck
How do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in society? Based on a landmark study that has collected data from more than 27,500 journalists in 67 countries, Worlds of Journalism offers a groundbreaking analysis of the different ways journalists perceive their duties, their relationship to society and government, and the nature and meaning of their work. Challenging assumptions of a universal definition or concept of journalism, the book maps a world populated by a rich diversity of journalistic cultures. Organized around a series of key questions on topics such as editorial autonomy, journalistic ethics, trust in social institutions, and changes in the profession, it details how the practice of journalism differs across the world in a range of political, social, and economic contexts. The book covers how journalism as an institution is created and re-created by journalists and how they experience their profession in very different ways, even as they retain a commitment to some basic, widely shared professional norms and practices. It concludes with a global classification of journalistic cultures that reflects the breadth of worldviews and orientations found in disparate countries and regions. Worlds of Journalism offers an ambitious, comparative global understanding of the state of journalism in a time when it is confronting a series of economic and political threats.
International news has long been studied and understood as produced by outsiders – foreign correspondents working in exotic, international locales. This book challenges this established view by putting the spotlight on the insiders working in their own countries producing news for international audiences. Western male foreign correspondents who report from areas affected by crises and conflicts for an ‘audience back home’ have long stood in as visible metaphors of international news production. But the understanding of who produces international news is starting to shift as scholars come to take into account the often-invisible role played by locally based, non-Western news-workers who have always been part and parcel of international news production. The roles and responsibilities of these professional, specialised locals within the global flow of news have only increased as falling news industry revenues have meant reductions in non-local staff in foreign news bureaus. Available research shows that the involvement of local journalists and fixers, as well as NGOs, as sources of news and information in international news production is marked by economic, socio-cultural and practice-related tensions. To shed light on these growing yet relatively less investigated changes happening in international news-making, this book brings together the latest of studies conducted on this form of journalistic labour around the world. This book will contribute to both the breadth and depth of our future understanding of local news-work that benefits distant audiences, and also help cement the place of such journalistic work as a vital topic of analysis in its own right. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.
