Stupart, Richard 
ORCID: 0000-0002-5936-2730
(2021)
Forgotten Conflicts: Journalists and the humanitarian imaginary.
In:
Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication.
Routledge,London, pp. 220-234.
ISBN 9781315363493
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Text
Preprint - Conflicted Witnesses.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript Download (246kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Journalists reporting on ‘distant’ conflict and humanitarian disasters are responsible for producing many of the most paradigmatic humanitarian texts – those that hail audiences as vicarious, cosmopolitan spectators positioned to act on others’ suffering. The social and infrastructural worlds in which such journalists work are often highly structured in terms of imagined sets of relations between spectators, sufferers and witnesses that resemble Chouliaraki's account of a humanitarian imaginary. Yet while much work has been done to investigate the humanitarian imaginary as it appears in audiences and texts, the question of what such imagined relations might look like for journalists reporting suffering has remained comparatively under-examined. Based on interviews with foreign and local-national journalists from a wide range of backgrounds reporting on war and its effects in South Sudan, I argue that their work is substantially understood in humanitarian terms. Moreover, the role of witness that journalists assign themselves within this schema entails norms of emotional detachment and objectivity familiar to ‘traditional’ accounts of journalistic ethics. These norms, in turn, sit in tension with the obligations that journalists feel when double interpellated as both witnesses and spectators to others’ suffering.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | journalism, ethics, south sudan, witnessing |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 31 Jan 2023 08:29 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Mar 2023 01:30 |
| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3167959 |
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