Abstract
In 2018, 80 reporters were killed, 348 incarcerated, and 60 held hostage around the world, contributing, as Reporters Without Borders ( https://rsf.org/en/news/rsfs-2018-round-deadly-attacks-and-abuses-against-journalists-figures-all-categories ) warned, to “an unprecedented level of hostility towards media personnel.” Considering these dangers, Lindsay Palmer’s Becoming the Story: War Correspondents Since 9/11 is an important exploration of the precarious work reporters face in covering modern conflicts. An assistant professor of global media ethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Palmer’s work is pioneering in documenting the challenges reporters struggle with in the modern era.
Palmer’s research includes an impressive 112 interviews with conflict correspondents and news editors across the world, but based heavily in the United States. She includes five main case studies: the 2002 kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, the 2006 injury of “embedded” ABC reporter Bob Woodruff in Iraq, the 2009 expulsion of journalists Maziar Bahari and Nazila Fathi from Iran, the sexual assault of CBS’s Lara Logan during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the 2012 death of London Times correspondent Marie Colvin in the Syrian civil war. These case studies provide detail and depth that is often lacking in studies relying exclusively on quantitative content analyses.
Becoming the Story centers on three themes. First, although the post-9/11 era includes its own unique challenges, many of the challenges conflict correspondents face today—such as physical risks and military censorship—trace back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Second, to the extent that conflict reporting post 9/11 deviates from previous trends, it is defined by a “performative”“safety culture” that instills in reporters a sense of false confidence in their security when covering conflict situations. Third, the fixation with safety culture emphasizes individual reporters and the challenges they face in conflict areas. Their struggles are reported in heavily melodramatic ways, emphasizing their responsibility to protect themselves from violence, independent of broader responsibility from media organizations. These depictions are highly “neoliberal”—envisioning reporters as principal agents in making their own history.
A major strength of Palmer’s book is that it touches on a broad number of problems related to conflict reporting. It explores how nationalistic pressures bias war coverage, spotlighting cases in which American (and Western) reporters falling in harm’s way are socially constructed in their home media as heroes, whereas those engaged in violence against the United States and allied forces and reporters are deemed villains. This dichotomy falls within a larger prowar framework that conforms to parent countries’ geopolitical interests, with U.S. and allied officials depicting their wars as conflicts between good and evil. By fixating on the stories of American reporters who are killed in conflicts U.S. media limit attention to non-American and non-Western reporters facing the same fate.
Nationalistic pressures also work to marginalize non-Western reporters, who serve as a source of contingent labor for Western corporate media. These freelancers—commonly known as “stringers”—aid American news outfits abroad by contributing to and writing about current events. But they often do not receive attention by way of formal credit (bylines) for their work. This is in part due to personal security concerns with being identified as collaborating with Western news sources, which may be seen in war zones as complicit with U.S. militarism.
Nationalistic biases also overlap with profit interests that drive Western news organizations. Palmer discusses how the closure of foreign news bureaus in the late 20th century—due to declining Western news audiences and profit concerns—contributed to the rising superficiality of U.S. news. American cultural insularity and ethnocentrism contributed to declining cosmopolitanism in U.S. news coverage. As a result, Western reporters face unique challenges in providing quality reporting, particularly during international crises and other major events. The declining presence abroad means American reporters struggle to provide adequate, nuanced accounts of international events. Stringers and citizen journalists are increasingly asked to compensate for the lack of a journalistic presence abroad, to the detriment of the news gathering process.
Scholars will find much to appreciate in this volume. The emphasis on the problems associated with “embedded” reporting—via journalists’ reliance on military “protection” and potential censorship—are explored. Also covered are the challenges “unilateral” reporters face due to the dangers inherent in warzone reporting—considering neoliberal journalistic values that place “responsibility” for providing security with individual reporters. Although Palmer’s work emphasizes the perils associated with neoliberal journalistic values, she does not engage with prominent critical theories, including Marxian and Gramscian critiques of dominant corporate news practices. Her discussion of contingent “stringer” labor begs a discussion of Marx’s concept of “alienated labor,” via the exploitation of reporters by corporate media. Furthermore, the privileging of American and allied journalists over non-Western ones could be situated within a hegemonic framework stressing the dichotomy between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims in U.S. military conflicts (Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent 2002), based on their nation of origin and their subsequent “propaganda” value in furthering U.S. geopolitical interests.
These points do not diminish the importance of Palmer’s book. It is a worthy contribution to the scholarly literature on media, war, and conflict. It should be required reading for scholars and students of journalism and political communication. It adds significant depth to our understanding of how reporters are affected by nationalistic and neoliberal business motives in their reporting of international events.