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

Abstract

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?’

Keywords

conflict reporting international journalism news work political economy of journalism risk witnessing

Risk is deeply connected to the culture of international conflict reporting. As news organizations have cut back on foreign bureaus and conflicts have grown more chaotic in recent years, popular commentary has turned to the disparate ways journalists and news organizations navigate the risks before them. Take, as an example, the stories of NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and GlobalPost photographer James Foley, two journalists kidnapped in Syria, one released and the other gruesomely beheaded by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). In Engel’s (2013) recounting of his December 2012 kidnapping, he credited his release to the ‘extraordinary efforts made by NBC’ (para 26), an assertion that persists despite later corrections to the details of his capture (Somaiya et al., 2015). The Boston Globe (2013) noted the disparity in resources available to Engel, where ‘hundreds of freelance journalists in global hotspots lack such protections’ (para 4).

James Foley, captured in Syria a month before Engel while covering the civil war in Aleppo for GlobalPost, was beheaded in an ISIS propaganda video released in August 2014 (Arkin, 2014). Although it is tempting to see Foley’s execution as an example of uneven access to resources, GlobalPost and Foley’s family spent millions of dollars on investigators and private security firms to find Foley, culminating in a failed US Army special operations mission nearly 2 years after his capture (Lockhart, 2014; Reston, 2014).

The risks facing international journalists are vast, and institutional resources do not always ensure safety. Both Foley and Engel had news organizations’ money and expertise behind them, but in these cases, as in many others, risk is presented as persistent, natural, and almost inevitable. Meanwhile, freelancers from Europe and the United States often must cobble together their own resources, while local journalists and fixers in conflict zones face the most severe threats of violence in order to bring stories to audiences (Simon, 2015).

The increased bodily risk faced by journalists echoes other forms of labor precarity in international media industries, but, as this article asserts, contemporary discourses construct risk as an increasingly individualized concern, valorized within traditions of journalistic witnessing, while obscuring the true costs of bringing stories back from conflict zones. For instance, journalist kidnappings and deaths in Syria have led the Committee to Protect Journalists to continually state that the country is among the most dangerous locations for journalists (Beiser, 2015). Despite this risk, the allure of war reporting remains almost ephemeral, as The Atlantic’s Dashiell Bennett asserts: ‘Reporters are told that they are crazy to be there, but then get rewarded (with actual journalism awards) for inserting themselves into the “bang bang” of frontline dangers’ (para 5). In the face of this increasing risk, organizations such as Vice, the GlobalPost, and Buzzfeed News have found ways to profit, often by shifting the burden of risk management onto the backs of individual journalists (Schwartz, 2016). As Giddens (1990) has argued, risk is an externalized condition of modern existence, and the management of risk fundamentally structures the relationship between individuals and institutions. In international conflict reporting, risk can be understood as part and parcel of an ever-expanding labor precarity in media industries, unequally distributed among staff correspondents and freelancers, as well as local journalists, stringers, activists, and fixers (Cohen, 2016; Seo, 2016).

Turning critical attention to the discursive means by which unequal distributions of risk are justified, made possible, sustained, and even presented as desirable shows how bodily threats constitute the increasingly precarious nature of journalistic work. The purpose of this article is to understand how risk operates as a shifting category of responsibility for news organizations, elucidating political and economic relationships among media companies and an increasingly contingent and amorphous labor pool made up of staff reporters, international freelancers, and the local journalists, activists, stringers, and fixers that often go unacknowledged in the news product. This article begins by theorizing risk within the political economy of journalism. It then turns to a broad archive of articles about international conflict and war reporting culled from industry-oriented publications such as Nieman Reports and The Columbia Journalism Review, as well as media criticism appearing in national outlets to interrogate the discourses that implicate institutions in the mitigation of risk, shift risk mitigation to individual new workers, and commodify risk in news products. By identifying the discursive strategies that naturalize risk within the labor of international conflict reporting, this article concludes by examining strategies that work to redefine the relationship between risk and journalistic value, and thus implicate non-journalistic actors in protecting news workers from bodily peril.

Risk and journalistic labor

Risk, as it connects to labor, has been a tricky concept to operationalize, and yet it has tremendous ramifications for understanding the changing nature of media work. Giddens (1990) defines risk as a series of conditions outside of one’s control that present unknown danger. Thus, the mitigation of risk requires a network of social relations, often embodied by institutions. In this construction, exposure to and mitigation of risk structure the relationship between individuals and organizations, as the techniques of observation, empiricism, and financialization allow risks to be defined, externalized, and quantified. Ideally, these techniques allow individuals and institutions to negotiate who assumes how much risk.

Yet, as Beck (1992) argues, the distribution of risk is also an exercise in power. Risk, like other labor arrangements, is often shifted from the institution to individual. Risk is one of the conditions of an expanding labor precarity that allows organizations to remain flexible by justifying fewer investments in protecting workers – in this case, from true bodily harm. As Terranova (2004) argues, the movement of risk from institutions to individuals requires networks of soft control predicated upon discursive tools and conceptual techniques that present risks as manageable. Terms such as ‘risk assessment’ and ‘risk evaluation’ imply a rational economic subject making sense of risk’s costs, thus revealing a market rationality that shifts risk from a collective concern to an individual one (Luhmann, 2002). Therefore, it is important to attend to not just the ideological justifications that shift risk to individuals, but also the mechanisms that separate individuals’ labor from the final news product, often by leveraging the structural dynamics of news production and distribution to the news organizations’ advantage (Cohen, 2015). Such trends have enabled management techniques that diminish the ‘collective intermediaries’ that once worked to mitigate risks, such as unions, robust insurance pools, and the maintenance of infrastructure (Hacker, 2008: 244).

However, notions of direct exploitation fail to capture the complex relationship between risk and labor in journalism. Historically, direct observation has been naturalized into the practice of journalism, obscuring the individual effort necessary to gather those observations, especially when those observations come from sources who are expected to have specialized information derived from their professional lives and daily experiences (Hamilton, 2014). Contemporary iterations of user-production build on these relations through the platforms, concepts, and production routines that construe individual experience as a raw material to be captured by journalistic practice (Hamilton and Heflin, 2011). As an example, notions of witnessing within citizen journalism offer a kind of ethical and philosophical justification for this kind of exploitation, as exemplified by the ideal that as long as the ‘truth’ is documented and disseminated widely, the risks faced by individuals are worth it (Allan, 2013). Thus, in the political economy of news, the risks individuals incur in the news production process are often sublimated beneath broader notions of serving a public interest, a trend that characterizes much of the history of news work (Hardt, 1995).

Risk and witnessing in international conflict reporting

Although growing threats of bodily harm may be considered part of the increasingly precarious nature of media work, war and conflict reporting has its own unique and historically situated relationship with bodily risk. At least in US and European contexts, a reporter’s exposure to risks has long determined the value of their work. For example, newsreels of the battles of World War II and artist illustrations of the US Civil War were legitimated as journalistic forms partially because the final product intuited an individual journalist’s proximity to danger (McCreery and Creech, 2014; Pearson, 1990). Meanwhile, on the ground at sites of conflict, threats of bodily harm were understood as inescapable, providing a moral power to news reports that challenged repressive governments (Al-Ghazi, 2014).

The romantic ideal of a journalist following the march of war to bring back stories, despite all apparent dangers, is specifically and historically tied to British colonial expansion, as foreign locales provided an exotic backdrop for stories of individual bravery (Hohenberg, 1995). As news professionalized and modern warfare grew more complex, war reporting became more specialized and benefitted from logistical investments from both militaries and news organizations. Over time, changes in media technology and an increasing number of reporters in war zones often created professional competition. With the rise of television news, reporters and editors were incentivized to take greater risks to beat out other organizations and produce stories that were closer to the action, as it was thought television audiences craved action-oriented visuals (Knightley, 1975). The implicit value of having one’s own reporter close to the story, as well as more riveting and compelling footage than one’s competitors, encouraged the growth of a complex infrastructure of foreign reporting, although US organizations have spent less on international reporting since the end of the Cold War (Hannerz, 2004).

Much of the labor that goes into international reporting remains obscured in the final news text. For much of the history of foreign reporting, undercompensated locals provided crucial knowledge and reporting work for major news agencies, both as fixers and as the local journalists who possess the most experience with a story (Seo, 2016). As Palmer (2015, 2016) notes, the privileging of Western professionals in international reporting discursively constructs an ethical regime that diminishes the work of local fixers, freelancers, and citizen journalists by folding their immaterial labor into the broader representational authority of international news organizations.

Journalism’s normative commitments work discursively to idealize the assumption of risk as a necessary part of news work. Dell Orto (2016) argues that humanistic commitments to tell untold stories have animated the work of foreign correspondents across history and also constructed risks as merely logistical or practical obstacles to storytelling. The act of bearing witness carries real discursive power in journalism and connotes a moral responsibility to document atrocities and broadcast them to an audience, with the implicit assumption that proximity to danger and risk undergirds witnessing’s moral force (Cottle, 2013; Tait, 2011; Zelizer, 2002). Journalistic truth telling, then, becomes its own moral justification for assuming certain risks and discursively crosses the boundaries between professionals and non-professionals alike (Ananny, 2015). As Gilewicz (2016) argues in the case of killed Syrian citizen journalist Rami al-Sayed, despite discursive uncertainty around his identity as a journalist, the notion ‘that when one has the ability to speak freely, one also has the public duty to speak the truth’ can work to legitimate his death as an acceptable risk in the face of a story that needed to be told (p. 3648). Furthermore, as Grindstaff and Deluca (2004) show, violence committed against journalists rhetorically articulates journalistic truth telling to a broader structure of social value that situates bodily risk as a precondition for understanding broader truths about international conflict. Construing witnessing or truth telling as a duty that one owes the broader world, regardless of personal danger, privileges notions of humanistic truth that obscure the conditions under which witnessing occurs (Peters, 2001).

The relationship between witnessing and risk is made more apparent and fraught when considering specifically non-US and European actors. As Kraidy (2016) argues, when activists and journalists faced grave risks to document popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the human body worked as an essential referent, foregrounding the assumption of risk as a direct challenge to repressive power. Witnessing by and for citizens that live in conflict zones, then, is a specific challenge to the global relations that make life precarious in areas of conflict (Mortensen, 2015). Yet, many of the reports and videos of bodily harm gathered by local citizens and journalists alike are often remediated into a journalistic political economy predominated by organizations in the US and Europe, where they are made part of journalistic narratives about conflict that assign unequal weight to varying accounts, often privileging professional perspectives (Chouliaraki, 2015). Therefore, for Chouliaraki, predominantly modes of journalistic witnessing unevenly humanize non-Western journalists and victims of conflict, and thus sustain unequal relations of global power by ‘both reporting on and reproducing the geo-political uncertainty’ that makes conflicts newsworthy (p. 1374). In representing the consequences of international violence, witnessing draws its power by affecting a politics of pity, relying on depictions of suffering to compel ethical action (Chouliaraki, 2010). It is not just the assumption of risk that is indicative of power imbalances between varying classes and nationalities of news workers and organizations, but the representation of risk as well. Although risk can be mitigated and navigated based on one’s access to resources, the imperative to assume and represent risk can also be driven by one’s relationship with the global forces that drive international conflict.

Analyzing the contemporary discourses of risk

To interrogate the discourses of risk, this analysis uses the tools of critical discourse analysis to understand news organizations’ responsibility to mitigate risk, individuals’ ability to navigate risk, and news texts’ capacity to commodify risks. The following sections focus on the ways in which discourses come to make certain conditions sensible as economic and material concerns and allow individuals and groups to exercise agency in response to those conditions (Dahlberg and Phelan, 2011). As Russell and Babrow (2011) note, risk is constituted in acts of communication, which ‘rationalize and reinforce many social, political, and economic structures’ (p. 244).

To that end, this analysis interrogates a wide-ranging collection of documents: stories about international reporters and reporting trends in the popular press, educational materials and best practice guides for aspiring reporters, marketing and instructional material from digital start-ups aimed at foreign freelancers, reports and guides on international reporting from journalism think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), articles on professional risk in the industry press, and various news stories about conflict reporting. Instead of reading for content, theme, or even deep structure, the materials were read as artifacts of a broader structure of representation, revealing a ‘grid of intelligibility’ that makes risk sensible within the broader practices and texts of conflict reporting (Foucault, 1972: 93).

The structural conditions of risk

News organizations’ policies and investments in risk management create the structural conditions under which journalists work. Yet, as much of the discussion around risk in conflict zones shows, there is an increasing sense of powerlessness among these organizations as budgets lag and the conditions in certain parts of the world grow ever more precarious (Beiser, 2015; Caesar, 2014; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2016). Syria offers a useful example not only because it is currently the most dangerous place for journalists but also because many news executives argue that, when compared to prior conflicts, the level of violence directed at journalists is unparalleled (Akins, 2013; Council on Foreign Relations, 2015). Others note that the chaos of Syria is part of a longer trend in international conflicts, where a journalistic identity offers fewer intrinsic protections than it used to:

Before Yugoslavia, journalists in warzones felt that the blue flak jacket of the press pack offered them some kind of immunity. Scott Anderson remembers that in El Salvador in the mid-Eighties – a ‘vicious, nasty war’ – the fact of being an accredited, visible journalist was still a protection. ‘You could tape “TV” to your car and drive back and forth across no-man’s land’, he says. ‘Seven or eight years later, in Bosnia, it was dramatically different. Taping “Press” or “TV” to your car was like putting a bull’s-eye on it’. (Caesar, 2014: para 30)

Yet, the notion that conflict has gotten more and more risky over time is a powerful one. CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent Laura Logan, who faced her own chilling incident reporting from Egypt in 2011, captures the workings of a discourse that assumes growing risk as a natural condition:

Daniel Pearl changed – what happened to Daniel Pearl changed – that set the stage for the changing of journalism. From that moment on, it was impossible for people like us to go and – and go and meet with Zarqawi and, you know, different members of al-Qaida. And that became the moment when we realized how little they needed us. They didn’t need us anymore. Social – you wonder about social media. They speak to their audience when they want to on their own terms, in their own way. (As quoted in Council on Foreign Relations, 2015: para 50)

Such statements naturalize chaos and threat as persistent conditions surrounding journalists, which news organizations struggle to mitigate amid other changes in the industry.

Freelancers are a uniquely vulnerable class of journalists, whose relationship with news organizations is often informal in ways that invite ethical complications for news institutions. One common response in Syria has been news organizations’ use of their economic power to discourage freelancers from taking unnecessary risks by refusing to buy stories from freelancers based in Syria (Gonzalez, 2014; Turvill, 2013). Yet, when done piecemeal, one organization at a time, this kind of intervention does little to shape the conditions of risk that surrounds freelancers, merely sending them to organizations that will pay (Rodgers, 2013). Furthermore, despite foundations such as the Rory Peck Trust (2013) questioning the need for reporters to place themselves at risk in Syria, a financial and moral imperative to cover the story remains, as exemplified in the words of war reporter and Rory Peck Trust trustee John Brabazon:

‘The financial reality of the established media is such that they can’t afford to send experienced journalists into Syria and insure them and pay them adequately’, he says. ‘For a news crew in Syria, it’s probably going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. They can’t do that. They’ve got to use freelancers. If all the freelancers stop going to Syria, all you’d get, potentially, is propaganda coming out’. (As quoted in Caesar, 2014: para 24)

Such statements reflect an assumption that freelancers are autonomous actors who will sell content to whoever is paying. Furthermore, developments in citizen journalism and activist media create an easy-to-gather stream of content that fills the demand for news, despite questions of bias or ethical complicity (Channel 4, 2012; Ulbricht, 2012). Such debates privilege class divisions among journalists and ‘does little for local journalists hoping to make a living by documenting the conflict’, precisely because journalists living in conflict zones often rely on freelancing contracts for their livelihood (Gonzalez, 2014: para 1).

As news institutions have been reluctant to adopt common standards for protecting staff reporters, freelancers, and local stringers and fixers equally, nongovernmental agencies, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontiers, and the Rory Peck Trust, have used their status as advocacy groups to push for more comprehensive safety policies. For example, the three-page ‘Global Safety Principles and Practices’ (2015: 1) outlines specific responsibilities for individual reporters (such as ‘journalists should have basic skills to care for themselves or injured colleagues’) and news organizations (such as ‘Editors and news organizations should be aware of, and factor in, the additional costs of training, insurance and safety equipment in war zones’). As a multi-agency intervention, it offers a normative standard that defines the ideal relationship between an individual news worker and their organization. It does not change the conditions journalists work under, but it offers individuals a codified set of expectations that can be used to argue against unnecessarily exploitative relationships. Furthermore, local journalists often report amid contentious political conditions, where antagonistic governments and military leaders do little to protect news work, and often openly threaten it. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ executive director Joel Simon (2015) has argued that as regimes from Colombia to Sri Lanka have found murdering journalists to be a brutal, but expedient, means for forwarding their own agendas with impunity, journalists and news organizations must develop transnational strategies of solidarity that use existing mechanisms of global governance, such as United Nations committees, international treaties, and foreign aid offices, to specifically protect the work of journalism.

NGOs and foundation bodies, then, act as a mediating infrastructure that offer various classes of news workers a kind of institutional power in the absence of organizational support or even governments sympathetic to the need to protect journalists (Powers, 2016). Although such organizations may offer support such as access to insurance, situational risk assessment and medical training, country-specific guidance, reliable fixers, access to better-paying freelancer markets, and markets for supplies like flak jackets, they still require news workers to learn how to navigate those resources individually, and in doing so, discursively fix these individuals in a network of conditions they have little access to or chance of affecting (Smyth, 2012). While access to resources and training offer individuals a means to more safely navigate their assignments, the very existence of such third-party guides reveals an implicit power imbalance between the individuals and news organizations, where knowledge of risk mitigation is its own kind of economic resource.

The individual navigation of risk

As news institutions and advocacy organizations wrestle with identifying and codifying structural risks in conflict reporting, it is left to individuals to develop strategies for navigating these risks. Simon (2015) succinctly characterizes the situation faced by those covering conflict as ‘squeezed between militants who target them and U.S. forces who either viewed them with extreme suspicion or failed to implement policies to mitigate risk’ (p. 64). Despite increasing precarity, as well as recurrent complaints from seasoned professionals about inexperienced neophytes (Kamber, 2011), certain conditions in the industry make conflict reporting possible, desirable, and economically viable. For instance, various start-ups, such as storyhunter, StoryFul, NewsMODO, NewsFixed, WorldCrunch, ARA Network, and GRN Live, offer unaffiliated freelancers access to a broad market of news organizations willing to pay for content, coalescing into what Nieman Reports has called an ‘ecosystem’ that helps both freelancers and local journalists ‘make a living’ once they are ensconced in a conflict zone (Dyer, 2014: 37). Given access to markets, and implied autonomy to work how one chooses, these groups embody a network of possibilities that make it reasonable for individual freelancers to occupy what Szeman (2015) has called an ‘entrepreneurial subjectivity’, whereby discourses that privilege economic opportunity valorize the precarity individuals assume in the pursuit of opportunity (p. 478). This logic is elegantly formulated in the assertion that ‘For editors, the start-ups are like temp agencies that provide on-the-spot workers on short notice …. For journalists, the start-ups are a way to maximize their income in the so-called “gig economy”’ (Dyer, 2014: 32). Veteran CBS News correspondent Steve Dorsey (2017) furthers the notion of journalist as a rational economic agent when he writes, in a book marketed to aspiring international freelancers, ‘Your first priority should be your survival, financially and physically’, aphoristically linking threats to life and livelihood (p. 9).

Despite the assumption that news workers in war zones have broad access to organizations willing to buy their work, it falls to individuals to navigate those relationships and negotiate with news organizations in what has become a crowded market. Take, for instance, the words of Italian photojournalist Francesca Borri as she describes an inherent power imbalance between her and her editors:

But whether you’re writing from Aleppo or Gaza or Rome, the editors see no difference. You are paid the same: $70 per piece. Even in places like Syria, where prices triple because of rampant speculation. So, for example, sleeping in this rebel base, under mortar fire, on a mattress on the ground, with yellow water that gave me typhoid, costs $50 per night; a car costs $250 per day. So, you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risk. (Borri, 2013: para 5)

As another example of the power editors wield over journalists, photojournalist Kimberly Johnson worked in Libya for USA Today without insurance because, in her words, ‘Pressing for insurance would’ve been a “deal breaker”’ (as quoted in Santo, 2012: para 12). Although Johnson notes that her decision to travel without insurance ‘was complete free will’, she casts the decision as a reasonable risk because her ‘priority was to get over there and tell a story’, indicating a discursive move that places the moral value of the story above any economic logic that defines the relationship between journalists and news organization (para 13).

As many of the examples indicate, risk exposure and mitigation follow an increasingly incidental and individualized logic. In one Nieman Reports story, freelancer Jacob Resneck’s choice to travel to Crimea on questionable flights without conflict insurance or a flak jacket is partially driven, on one hand, by a decision to not be ‘one of the guys running around dodging explosions’ and, on the other, to protect the slim profit margins he makes freelancing (Dyer, 2014: 32). Yet, for this individualizing logic to work, it requires the assumption that conflict journalists are essentially different from other people, in that they are constitutionally capable of tolerating a wider range of risks. This assertion carries through the biography of individual journalists. Feinstein (2014), writing about the neuropsychology of risk, reveals a constitutional essentialism that characterizes many of the biographies of conflict journalists: ‘to maintain the momentum to return to war year after year, notwithstanding the enormous risks to be negotiated, requires a particular kind of biological template that eschews the nine-to-five, the humdrum suburban existence’ (para 26). This is echoed in Vanity Fair’s profile of Agence France-Press’ Marie Colvin after her death during a bombing in Syria:

Colvin’s boldness in war zones across the world could appear like a form of derring-do or addiction to the poison elixir of battle, as one reporter called it, but the truth was more complex. For years, the ferocious competition for scoops in the British foreign press thrilled Colvin and completely suited her nature. More, she had a deep commitment to reporting the truth. (Brenner, 2012: para 14)

When such motivations are individualized, they are rendered as ultimately mercurial, and thus inconsequential to the economics that surround war and conflict reporting. They also construe war and conflict reporting as a kind of privilege that extends from an individual’s identity, overlooking what, for many local journalists who were there before the conflict started, is a necessity born of circumstance.

Thus far, this article has dealt with the structures of risk that surround mostly US and European journalists, but it must be noted that the gravest threats are often felt by the reporters, photographers, bloggers, and fixers who call sites of conflict home. As the Committee to Protect Journalists (2017a, 2017b) has found, 86% of the 179 journalists killed in Iraq were Iraqis, while nearly all the journalists killed covering drug cartels in Mexico have been Mexican or worked for Mexican outlets. These numbers suggest a kind of outsourcing of risk, similar to labor trends in other global industries. These journalists often have no institutional body to appeal in order to protect their rights, often articulating an understanding of their work as ‘dangerous … you could lose your life at any moment’ (Ayub Nuri, quoted in On the Media 2013, para 11). But they also have less power to refuse, as stated by Syrian freelancer Ibrahim Al Idelbi: ‘If I get a request by Al Jazeera to cover some battle, I go …. Even if it was in a dangerous zone, there were only [a] few times when I declined missions for my own safety’ (quoted in Bdiwe, 2015: para 10). As the most precarious of journalists, there is ‘the perception, in mainstream media at least, that the death of an international reporter is more costly than the death of local Syrian reporters’, with the added indignity that an international media organization may not pay if quality of the material is not sufficient for broadcast or publication (para 14).

This general disregard for local journalists and freelancers is part of a broader devaluing of journalistic work, where the labor of the most marginal people is the least valued and most hidden in the final product. Although certain organizations, such as Global Voices, have created digital platforms and given these individuals more control over their own stories, as well as access to the same markets as other freelancers, other platforms capture this work and obscure its origin for primarily Western audiences, though often with the moral imperative to see conflict through local eyes. The imperative to witness often conflates an assumption of risk with a moral obligation to produce true accounts of war and suffering, as captured in the words of Syrian refugee and activist journalist AbdAlaziz Alhamza: ‘We are fighting for our city …. We don’t have weapons, but we have our pens or our website or whatever. We are fighting online’ (As quoted in Calderone, 2015, para 3). These statements, though, obscure the increasingly perilous conditions faced by various classes of news workers and the complex digital infrastructures allow news organizations to profit from their content. As the next section will show, in the gap between structural conditions and individual motivations, practices of commodification situate journalists between a moral urge to document the truth and a system that derives profit from that truth.

Caught between commodification and witnessing

Reporters caught in conflict face an uncomfortable reality: their proximity to danger not only drives reader interest in a story but also creates an economic incentive for news organizations. As Bennett et al., (2013) states,

conflicts like Syria get more attention back home when the reporters themselves get hurt, or kidnapped, or even killed. No matter how many times they report on battles and casualty figures, it’s the story of the reporter dodging bullets that grabs readers’ attention. (Para 8)

Journalists, then, are caught in a double bind between an obligation to witness and report the truth of a conflict by taking increasingly dangerous risks that, when foregrounded in the reporting, create an impetus to take more risks. It is an ethical conundrum captured best in Caesar’s (2014) words:

So, what guides a journalist’s decisions in these unlovely places? The frequently repeated maxim that ‘no story is worth dying for’ rings a little hollow. The awkward truth is that, in this field, personal bravery is simultaneously discouraged and rewarded. (Para 15)

Vice offers a useful, if at times extreme, example of how the uncomfortable relationship between witnessing and commodification can lead a company to not only incentivize increased risks among its journalists but also offer minimal mitigation in the pursuit of profit. Valued between US$4.2 and US$4.5 billion in its initial public offering, Vice benefits from a brand identity that targets an elusive male demographic through stories that often show reporters taking risks others would consider foolhardy (Gobry, 2014; Steinberg, 2016). Vice reporters have gained access to the secretive government of North Korea, filed a five-part documentary from inside terrorist group ISIS shortly after the beheading of James Foley, and have been kidnapped in Ukraine while reporting from the frontlines of protests preceding Russia’s annexation of Crimea, leading New York Times media critic and former Vice skeptic David Carr (2014) to write, ‘I’m just glad that someone’s willing to do the important work of bearing witness, the kind that can get you killed if something goes wrong’ (para 22).

But a style of journalism based on proximity to danger also serves to commodify risk as an essential part of the news product, thus drawing attention to the obligations a news organization owes its journalists. As noted in a prominent feature in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘Vice walks a thin line between entertainment and journalism’, and it is the impulse to entertain that prominently places Vice correspondents in the foreground of their stories, within an editorial brand that reveals risks to audiences through the reporter’s subjectivity (Ip, 2015: para 32). In reporting about the company, Vice executives admit that this is a conscious part of the company’s branding strategy, as opposed to its editorial mission, and it has seen record growth with a style of journalism that ‘has mastered the mass production of authenticity for profit’ (para 8).

For the purposes of this article, this kind of exploitation is in part forwarded by an affective, discursively based moral appeal to the importance of witnessing atrocity. Borri’s (2013) words again capture a certain kind of inevitability individual journalists are caught between, if they remain compelled to witness:

People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. (Para 3)

Journalists driven by a need to witness have little control over the economic conditions they are caught within (Cohen, 2016). So then, it falls to editors to decide how to navigate these conditions, as in the words of Sunday Times deputy editor Graeme Paterson: ‘This is not a financial decision. It is a moral one’ (as quoted in Marthoz, 2013: para 3).

Risk is inextricably bound up with notions of witnessing, precisely because it relies on a credibility based on proximity (Allan and Zelizer, 2004). Although digital technologies may increase the distance between individuals and risks, there remains among journalists a powerful ethos that ‘To bear witness means being there – and that’s not free …. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenaline rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt’ (Cohen, 2009, paras 5–6). Therefore, if witnessing is to remain a central tenet of journalism and conflict reporting, then it is incumbent upon organizations, editors, reporters, and audiences alike to also make transparent that this kind of witnessing ‘is a very expensive thing to do’ (Bruns, 2006: para 14).

Conclusion

In many ways, risk appears to be an intractable condition that surrounds the work of conflict reporting for freelancers, staff journalists, and their local counterparts. However, as this analysis has shown, exposure to risk is unevenly distributed across the broad ecology of news workers, with freelancers and citizen journalists managing their own logistics with various organizations caught up in an ethical bind about how to capitalize off their reporting without resorting to outright exploitation. An exploitive logic appears nearly inescapable, overdetermining the conditions under which news is produced, not to mention the fact that non-Western journalists, activists, fixers, and other non-traditional news workers often face threats that are rarely accounted for, let alone mitigated. As such, risk takes on a particularly economic tenor, echoing the increasing precarity of all news labor.

Yet, emergent alternatives and interventions exist, aimed at making the work of conflict reporting more equitable for varying classes of news workers by making risks more visible in ways that decouple the threat of bodily harm from a purely economic logic. Organizations that overtly state the ways in which witnessing and economic precarity often go hand in hand offer journalists an alternative means to both support their work and help them manage the risks involved. For instance, the Global Reporting Center supports projects with funds from academic, philanthropic, and industry sources in order to support international freelancers and local journalists with ‘stories that don’t have immediate market potential’ so that journalists can sustain their work with projects that are not dictated by a market logic that subsumes personal risk beneath the final product (Klein, 2016: para 12). Furthermore, many funding sources specifically privilege the work of local journalists, consciously providing an economic preference for the most precariously situated. Elsewhere, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Rory Peck Trust have been putting pressure on global news organizations to sign on to the ‘Global Safety Principles and Practices’, which commits organizations to offering contingent workers from all backgrounds financial and logistical support that is equitable to what staff journalists can expect. Such interventions, though, may be limited as market-oriented solutions, relying on the benevolent use of economic power to make the mitigation of risk more equitable across classes of news workers.

Changing the contexts in which journalism is considered valuable offers a non-market-oriented means for arguing for the better protection of journalists. Local news organizations in places such as Iraq and Syria rarely have the economic or political resources to pressure government and military leaders on behalf of news workers, but partnerships between organized groups, such as the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, and international governmental bodies, such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), create the kind of institutional power that draws attention to journalistic risk as a phenomenon worthy of attention and policy action (UNESCO Office for Iraq, 2015). Other efforts can foreground the value of journalistic work outside of an economic context, such as United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) promotion of peace journalism via training materials authored by South African journalist Peter du Toit (2014), which situate the expertise and experience of local journalists as fundamental to their ability to act as honest brokers in resolving conflicts by accurately accounting for and representing all stakes and all sides in ways that political actors cannot. Such assertions make the work of conflict journalism more valuable within processes of global governance, if not news economics. These projects, when grounded in the particularities of journalistic expertise, point to an important reconsideration of journalists’ value that often leads to substantive governmental change (AFP 2015; Besheer, 2015). By re-centering the work of conflict journalism within the realms of policy and politics and away from market-oriented understandings of journalism, these projects create a definition of journalistic value that demands greater protections from a wider variety of actors – not just news organizations but also the governments and military forces involved in conflicts, as well as outside governments and agencies interested in conflict resolution.

Such interventions, though, require engaging critically with the economic conditions and cultural logics that surround conflict journalism and normalize its risks as an acceptable part of journalism’s increasing precarity. In short, this means recasting witnessing not just as a moral imperative, but one that also comes with costs that are distributed unequally. In drawing attention to the economic logics implicit in journalism’s normative ideals, scholars, commentators, and journalists alike may develop the discursive tools that allow us to more forcefully ask, ‘Who should bear the costs of witnessing and how should those costs be paid?’

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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