Journalists' Attitudes towards War Reporting

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Tim Markham, who shifts our focus to war reporting - what impact do the conditions of reporting have on the way journalists relate to one another? In this, he takes on journalists' identities, values, and ethics as strategic. There are two symbolic economies that underpin war reporting - mystification (why journalists have differing standing and jobs is unclear to them) and ambivalence (a downplayed distanced relationship to their journalistic work). This ties into a broader trend of anti-establishment attitudes.

This builds on Bourdieu's field model, which is sometimes criticised as deterministic (claiming to be able to make predictions about behaviour) and conservative; however, fields do not exist in a vacuum, and journalism sits in relation to other fields so that journalists are simultaneously immersed. Finally, the experience of the field is also influenced by broader trends - shifting boundaries between the public and private, for example.

War itself also isn't static, and war reporting changes with it. There is a stability in journalists' views on war, and they translate experiences from one war to another (their own and those of others'); journalistic constraints in reporting are well recognised, and different responses by individual journalists are highlighted by the journalists themselves in distinguishing themselves from one another.

Some conditions for war reporting are stable and inevitable (the military's tendency to allow reporting only through embedding or pooling), while others are changeable - and journalists tend to respond with guile to these constraints in order to increase their ability to report. New technologies also provide new resources for ingenuity, but there is an ambivalence towards the flashy and superficial; journalists are stuck between technological determinism and voluntarism.

One response to technological changes is just getting on with the job; however, journalists now also deal with citizen war reporting by soldiers themselves (e.g. posting vdeos on YouTube), which may disrupt the mystification of war reporting.

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