Saints and witnesses: Virtue and vocation in the memorialization of the Western conflict journalist

Stupart, Richard ORCID: 0000-0002-5936-2730 and Sharp, Rob (2023) Saints and witnesses: Virtue and vocation in the memorialization of the Western conflict journalist. Media, War & Conflict.

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Abstract

<jats:p> How are Western journalists who are killed in the course of their work remembered? Using the biographies of journalists killed covering conflict, this article investigates the discursive repertoires through which the memorialization of journalists killed while reporting conflict is accomplished. The authors argue that such journalists are consistently constructed as humanitarian, cosmopolitan witnesses engaged in supererogatory moral projects involving justice and voice for those outside of these journalists’ geopolitical home communities. This particular articulation appears to herald a recent shift in the memorialization of the journalistic dead, although it is continuous with longer discourses in fields such as photojournalism and its idea of the ‘concerned photographer’. We speculate that this shift is consistent with material changes in the field – in particular, the precaritization of conflict reporting driving journalists into the material and social world of professional humanitarianism, whose discourses around the moral worth and cosmopolitan nature of the work have colonized the subfield of conflict reporting. </jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	05 Jun 2023 10:30
Last Modified:	24 Jul 2023 11:29
DOI:	10.1177/17506352231184154
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3170816