Friends like these: A shift in labour,security and the normative ideals of conflict journalism

Abstract

This paper draws on previous work in the fields of conflict studies and journalism studies, as well as empirical work by the authors on the normative language of conflict journalism to argue that this subfield of journalism appears to have increasingly ‘moved house’ from the normative universe of institutional journalism to that of professional humanitarianism. We describe three shifts that are taking (or have taken) place whose effects may include a transformation of ideas around ‘what conflict journalism is for’ and how it understands its presence in armed conflict.

Keywords

Labour precarity humanitarianism cosmopolitanism conflict

As we write this, a war in Ukraine is prompting scholars of media and war to rethink many of the assumed interactions between media, media workers and the conflicts they cover. From one point of view, the disintegration of boundaries between journalism and ‘partisan’ media has become highly visible: ad hoc coalitions of media professionals, humanitarians of different stripes and independent voices uninterested in claiming cliché titles of ‘citizen journalist’ have assumed substantial responsibility for the mediation of the war to international audiences.

The mixedness of how the war is being represented ranges from orthodox news reporting by recognisable networks to volunteer NGO campaigns to document Russian war crimes (Amnesty International, 2022) and online communities dedicated to counting losses of materiel¹ and interrogating open-source footage from the frontlines. Local reporters have gained huge international followings on social media, in ways that are strikingly different to other recent global conflicts, particularly in the global south, where local journalists (often relegated to fixing roles for internationals) often remain ‘invisible’, underlining clear global and racial hierarchies of such reportage (Palmer, 2019). Yet as with much that is ‘new’ about the hybrid nature of reporting the war in Ukraine, newness may not be marking novelty, so much as a shift in degree (of the phenomena or Western academia's notice of it).

The entanglement of media in the humanitarian politics of violence has been clear since the era of Belgian atrocities in the Congo, where the images and accounts of missionaries became the evidence for political movements in Europe (Hochschild, 1998). For humanitarians, the value of (news) media as a humanitarian weapon has long been taken for granted. Many international humanitarian organisations draw communications staff from the world of journalism (Orgad, 2013; Wright, 2018) and see news media as an especially powerful conduit for mobilising public feeling and action (Brown and Minty, 2012).

For its part, journalism has had mixed feelings about its normative relationship with institutional humanitarianism. On the one hand, the profession has for the most part upheld norms against overtly emotionalising reporting (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013) and arguments in favour of morally denunciatory journalism – most famously Bell's (1998) post-Yugoslavia arguments in favour of attachment – have often met with pointed resistance (Ward, 1998). Yet for all the normative misgivings about the politics of taking humanitarian positions, journalists have been content to rely on humanitarian organisations as fixers, occasional employers (Wright, 2016b), providers of supporting infrastructure (Stupart, 2020) and information subsidies (McPherson, 2016). Furthermore, when morally tested, such as in the case of being asked to testify at the international tribunal following the war in Yugoslavia, the community of conflict journalists split along lines demarcated in part around questions of whether or not the profession ought to entail explicit commitments to justice for the harmed (Beattie, 2006; Tumber, 2008).

So while a ‘grey area’ – to borrow Wright's (2016b) term – has long existed between the two fields, we argue that shifts are occurring in the labour, infrastructural arrangements and norms of the space where conflict journalism and humanitarianism meet. Taken together, we suggest that these shifts point to a normative relocation – a ‘moving house’ process, normatively speaking – in which the journalism of conflict increasingly takes place within a humanitarian, rather than journalistic world. We mean this in both the literal sense of a growing material dependence between the two and in terms of the social imaginaries journalists are operating in. We argue that this process is uneven and depends on such things as the economics and security infrastructure of specific conflicts, the situation-specific pressures for collaboration between humanitarians and journalists and hierarchies of access within the journalistic field, such as inequalities between ‘local’ and ‘international’ journalists. In the discussion that follows, we point to three shifts in conflict journalism that suggest this ‘relocation’ is taking place, before reflecting on some of the complexity of this process and the questions that it raises for journalism, humanitarian communication and the work of witnessing conflict more generally. The ‘humanitarian journalism’ (Scott et al., 2023) that results will be caught between the norms of both fields, even as it asserts itself as a significant part of the news ecosystem through which news of risk and conflict are reported internationally. It is an interesting case from an interdependencies perspective – the focus of this special issue – both in the sense that it is a new form of journalism arising out of a professional interdependency and in the sense that it creates new questions and challenges for the existing interdependencies of both fields. An example of this latter point that we discuss further on is the complications that a closer journalism-humanitarianism relationship might create for fixers and other ‘non-journalistic’ relationships that are key to accessing and producing stories.

Three shifts in conflict journalism

Evidence of the shift in conflict journalism towards the humanitarian can be seen in at least three ways. In the first, financial precarity is leading to conflict journalism becoming an increasingly hybrid occupation split between humanitarian media production and war reporting (Wright, 2016b). We argue that such conditions, alongside the increasing reliance of war reporters on work subsidised by NGOs has led to a deepening of ties between these two professions. Second, the various occupational subsidies extended to journalists in many conflict contexts – such as bunkerized accommodation, flights and professional services – give journalists an everyday worldview of conflict that is more aligned with humanitarian experiences. To the extent that worldviews – and intense, morally significant ones in particular – have socialising effects, we might expect embeds with humanitarian organisations to have effects on the norms of the journalists who take advantage of them. Third, the memorialisation of deceased conflict journalists by foundations reinforces an idea of the field as principally humanitarian in its relationship to the wars it covers. We connect these observations by arguing that they present evidence of an uneven shift in the norms of conflict journalism towards a more humanitarian telos, something we argue deserves further empirical enquiry.

Labour and boundaries in conflict journalism

Existing work in journalism studies on the professional relationships between journalists and humanitarians has highlighted various areas where the work of these two professional communities overlaps. Gandy (1982), for example, has pointed to humanitarian news subsidies as a way of thinking about the increased reliance of journalists on humanitarians for media material. This argument has been extended by McPherson (2016), who has argued for an appraisal of humanitarians as providers of an ‘information subsidy’ too, through their willingness to act as credible sources for media organisations unwilling or unable to develop their own source networks in particular contexts.

Elsewhere, Wright (2016b) has pointed to professional ‘grey areas’ where some journalists work on and off for NGOs alongside their primary reporting work, in part as a result of shared values, but also as a means of coping with increasing precarity experienced while covering the world's less in-demand conflicts. Wright argues that these shared values are partially the consequence of former journalists moving into humanitarian communications roles, from where they are able to negotiate a shared respect for norms common to both groups (Wright, 2018).

There is by now a well-developed literature focusing on the growing precarity of the (generally Euro-American) war correspondent (Stupart, 2021a; Ashraf and Phelan, 2018). Palmer (2019) discusses the ‘industrial’ or financial precarity of freelance work exacerbated by what she terms ‘socio-political precariousness’ arising from how journalists and their work are perceived by conflict parties. As she puts it, ‘the international political instability [can] encourage certain actors to identify a war correspondent as an “enemy”, as a pawn in a larger political manoeuvre, or as a symbol of a particular nation or region of the world’ (Palmer, 2019: 85). This argument has been echoed by others: Shah et al. have explored how journalists in Pakistan have been forced to negotiate local perceptions in order to operate safely, while Sutton and Stupart (2021) have argued that both journalists and humanitarians in South Sudan are required to engage in similar forms of perception management as a form of safety work in order operate safely.

Rather than focusing on the precarity of conflict reporting itself, our interest lies primarily in the changes to the practices and ethics of humanitarians and journalists encouraged by these shifting economics. Cooper (2018) highlights descriptions of journalists and NGO workers as in a ‘mutually exploitative’ relationship – as sources, and as means of securing coverage, respectively. However, the increasingly hybridised nature of this relationship poses new questions for this interdependency in terms of ethics, objectivity norms and the realignment of organisational values, given the large numbers of former journalism professionals working in communications roles in NGOs and the texts and discourses they (re)produce.

These journalists-turned-humanitarians craft news-focused stories in negotiation with their policy colleagues, highlighting in conversation across the organisation values through which they hope to gain traction within the mainstream news agenda. This has implications for the internal politics of humanitarian organisations, which can be a source of tension between an NGO's fundraising and advocacy teams (Orgad, 2013), but also for the relationships between humanitarian news organisations. As the communications agenda of humanitarian organisations take on some of the norms and vocabulary of journalism (paying attention to the news cycle, the importance of news values and objectivity/truthfulness in reporting, for example), the more this creates a common vocabulary (and, by implication, an imaginary underlying it) through which the two professions become not only able to communicate and collaborate, but in so doing also able to (re)imagine the norms and purposes of two fields that have begun to look increasingly alike.

Journalistic practice inveigling its way into humanitarian communications has been noted by Power (2018: 155), who describes the ‘double-edged’ nature of NGOs adopting a news-focused approach that adopts traditional journalistic routes to publication. Power argues that while such approaches shine a light on humanitarian issues otherwise ignored by the mainstream news agenda – one only has to put Amnesty International's name into a search engine to see the scale of their news output – they are also beholden to many of journalism's values – most especially norms around objectivity. It is our contention that these two kinds of institutions – NGOs on the one hand, journalism on the other – can no longer be usefully theorised as entirely discrete. Rather they resemble increasingly interdependent fields of media production, with increasingly common journalistic norms around the publication of stories and humanitarian norms in terms of the telos of the work (what media is meant to achieve).

The security of humanitarian infrastructure

In the case of many conflict spaces which have become the subject of sustained interest by international humanitarian efforts – South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia, for example – a common infrastructure of protected accommodation, transport and logistics tends to develop. One reliable feature of this infrastructure is the United Nations’ Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS), which functions as a kind of ‘UN Airways’, shuttling humanitarians, peacekeepers and occasional journalists from secure location to another. For journalists, access to seats on an UNHAS flight can be a huge boon, amounting to safe, often free passage to remote field sites and humanitarian bases of operation, granted at the discretion of particular UN officials. On both ends of an UNHAS flight, one would also generally find a reasonably developed security infrastructure of enclosed, bunkerised compounds belonging to UN entities and humanitarian organisations.

Described by Duffield (2010) as an ‘archipelago of international space’, the infrastructure laid down by large humanitarian organisations and the United Nations for the purpose of protecting their staff and operations has been a subject of study in conflict studies and humanitarian literature for some time. As the ‘archipelago’ metaphor describes, the secure accommodation compounds and the travel links between them amount to a web of international space, in which humanitarians and others can live, work and play despite the insecurity of life outside. Work in the field of conflict studies has long argued that the interior of securitised humanitarian space is not simply materially different, but socially different too. The terms ‘aidland’ (Apthorpe, 2005; Mosse, 2011) and ‘peaceland’ (Autesserre, 2014) have been variously used to describe and critique the effects of life inside the securitised bubble that this security infrastructure affords, but these insights have largely remained peripheral to thinking about humanitarian/journalist relations. The term ‘Aidland’ was coined to invoke the story of Alice in Wonderland, on the basis that the interior of this secured humanitarian space resembles a strange bubble of international cosmopolitan sociality, often divorced from the reality of the world outside. In this sense, it resembles something like the social space of ‘the journalist hotel’ in the modern history of conflict reporting, such as the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo (Morrison and Lowe, 2020).

The safety and cost-effectiveness of humanitarian infrastructure (from the point of view of journalists who can obtain permission to use it) makes it an obvious source of safe travel, accommodation and access to sources when working in unsafe contexts. The reliance of journalists on humanitarian actors for safe passage via this infrastructure fosters opportunities for developing a common habitus and imaginary (in Taylor's [2002: 106] sense) between humanitarian actors and journalists covering conflict (Wright, 2016a). Constituting a form of security subsidy in which these organisations take on a responsibility for journalists’ safety that news organisations may be unwilling or unable to bear, such humanitarian embedding may shape the way in which journalists experience the situations they are reporting on. We argue that there is good reason to think that such shared arrangements may contribute to the ‘humanitarian socialisation’ of conflict journalists in ambivalent ways. This can include creating common perceptions of ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ space and conflict actors (Stupart, 2020) and ways of cooperating and seeing the world more broadly. Circulating in proximity to humanitarians (physically and socially) may also provoke ethical challenges for journalists who find themselves ‘double interpellated’ as (potential) humanitarians as well as journalists (Sutton and Stupart, 2021) in ways that require practical ethical decisions to resolve (Stupart, 2021a).

Our argument, then, is that the security subsidy offered to journalists by the Aidland infrastructure of international humanitarianism creates obvious incentives for journalists to enter the literal and imagined world of humanitarians. Indeed, in many cases, it would be impossible for conflict journalism to proceed without access to these spaces and resources. The shared UNHAS flight, the overnight stay in a humanitarian compound or the long journeys with humanitarian hosts as companions all add up sociologically speaking, to a shift in habitus – particularly where the work of reporting is being done by freelance or otherwise precariously employed reporters working with few other colleagues present in the field.

The normative ideals of conflict journalism

Finally, we observe that the language in which the profession justifies itself in moments of loss appears to rely far more on the language of humanitarian cosmopolitanism than that of institutional journalism (Sharp and Stupart, 2023). We argue that the language used by memorial foundations to commemorate journalists killed reporting on conflict increasingly relies on a normative ideal of conflict journalism as a humanitarian, witnessing endeavour in ways that diverge from previous ideas of what conflict journalism ‘was for’ and what its ideal motivations were. Such ‘humanitarian cosmopolitans’ (Chouliaraki, 2013), articulate assumptions of moral equality, with the journalist positioned as a privileged agent, obliged to bear witness to injustice abroad (Tait, 2011).

We argue that the way journalists who died in the line of duty covering conflicts are memorialised has tended to valorise them in a language of humanitarian excellence (as witnesses, as givers of voice and helpers of others), rather than in terms of more traditional norms associated with journalism (objectivity, balance, excellence at the craft). In our earlier work on this phenomenon (Sharp and Stupart, 2023), we highlighted the case of how journalistic foundations memorialising the work of war correspondents help construct the moral basis for the subfield of humanitarian/conflict journalism which we discuss here. These trusts and foundations inscribe logics of war correspondents’ work around metaphors of sainthood and morality, adopting a peculiarly religious language that frames reporters’ practices through a cosmopolitan, humanitarian moral lens (Chouliaraki, 2013). They describe war correspondents’ work as a source of virtue, through framing reporters’ lives as particularly saint-like, in a manner evoking Christian themes of a kenotic Christ, who left the comforts of heaven behind to live among men.

We argue that the construction of the moral universe underpinning humanitarian journalism is underexplored in the literature. According to Wright, Scott and Bunce (2019), research on foundations presently focuses on the effects they have on journalistic autonomy (see also Browne, 2010; Ferrucci and Nelson, 2019). Beyond this, researchers have also considered the effects of foundation funding on the way journalism is valued and practised (Carlson, 2015: 2). In the case of memorial foundations, we have argued that the discourses of foundations are particularly well placed to construct the moral norms and telos of humanitarian journalism, due to their ability to connect claims about the moral purpose of humanitarian journalism to the marytrdom of high-profile reporters.

In analysing the work of these foundations, we focused in particular on the literature around the discursive repertoires of journalistic deaths. Particular milestones include Carlson's (2006) study of the death of NBC reporter David Bloom and Washington Post reporter Michael Kelly, which argues for the importance of narratives of bravery, volunteerism, sacrifice and witnessing. In addition, Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt's (2014) Journalism and Memory describe memory work around the commemoration of journalists which we extended to foundations.

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of five journalistic foundations’ ‘about me’ and ‘foundation aims’ pages, we were interested in descriptions of journalists in terms of their supererogatory moral acts: actions that are morally praiseworthy – those acts that go above and beyond the usual call of duty. Using McGoldrick's (1984: 523) description, the supererogatory moral agent acts are those ‘with the highest possible moral evaluation…though their performance is seldom, if ever, considered obligatory’ – including being exposed to physical danger.

We considered foundations memorialising the work of Marie Colvin, Tim Hetherington, Camille LePage, James Foley and Chris Allen, selected because they represent hegemonic constructions of journalists as humanitarians, where each organisation is rooted in a Euro-American universalist conception of journalism that benefits from forms of professional, social and financial capital unavailable to the families of journalists living in the countries to which such journalists travel to report, and in this case, died: Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

We argued that these foundations drew from three distinct discursive repertoires. Firstly, we saw the construction of the journalist as humanitarian, cosmopolitan adventurer as pervasive through many of the foundation texts explored, a discourse which valorises the journalist of conflict as a cosmopolitan saviour or agent of justice. We argue that such discourses of the journalist as a humanitarian cosmopolitan are examples of Chouliaraki's observation of the humanitarian imaginary as a ‘configuration of practices…which perform collective imaginations of vulnerable others…with a view to cultivating a longer-term disposition to thinking, feeling and acting towards these others’ (2013: 45). This view frames cosmopolitanism as ‘an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other… an intellectual and aesthetic stance towards divergent cultural experiences, a search of contrasts rather than uniformity’ (Hannerz, 1996: 103). These might also be considered as moral projects in which the journalist is valorised for seeking out the ‘voiceless’ and acting as their representative.

Secondly, we also observed that, beyond the valorisation of the lives of the journalists themselves, the language and structure of witnessing would frequently surface, often directly. In these lexicalisations, we saw journalists articulated as bearing witness in the service of the suffering – essentially called to their work in the manner of a vocation and ultimately framed as martyrs dying in their pursuit of a morally distinctive duty.

Thirdly, practitioners were frequently described as ‘giving a voice’ to those on whom they reported, a claim to be wary of, particularly if those voices are given on the terms of those reporting them. Despite this, this construction relating to voice by foundations around these journalists’ work was common.

It is likely not a coincidence that many of the repertoires we identified are found throughout the social life of institutional humanitarianism more generally. As Rieff's (2002) account of the rise of humanitarianism in the West makes clear, principles of charity, cosmopolitan ethics, voice and witnessing are common in modern humanitarian discourse. Médecins Sans Frontières, for example, explicitly acknowledges a principle of témoignage (witnessing) as part of their work, and was founded as a cosmopolitan ethical project after the disillusionment of aid workers attempting to assist and speak out during the Biafran war.

The memorialisation of journalists binds the phenomenological experience of conflict reporting together. Given the affective and emotional difficulty of the work (Stupart, 2021b), our findings suggest foundation discourses play a role in lending these experiences value. Understood as such, the construction of the journalist as a secular, cosmopolitan saint articulates experiences of risk, danger and hardship into a story of moral valour while glossing over the structural causes of these experiences.

With this in mind, it is our aim to imagine different memorialisations in which the structures that lead to the death of journalists, such as a precarious and neoliberal ordered news economy (Rentschler, 2007) and the mixture of the practices of media and conflict (Korf et al., 2010) are more prominently part of the picture. In this way, we hope to move on to a different description of the field which better reflects commitments to ending the exploitation of those engaged in this form of reporting. More explicitly, we need to acknowledge the cost of the exclusion of those working – and dying – in the service of these practices who do not bear the honour of cementing its boundaries. This might include the Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kushynova, who died in March 2022 and had worked as a fixer for Fox News, or Abed Takoush, who died in 2009 and had worked for CNN in Somalia (Luckhurst, 2022).

Needless to say, without the cosmopolitan power of their institutional media equivalents, there are few memorial foundations celebrating fixers to analyse. The BBC's reporting of the death of Kushynova quotes her described as a ‘bright light’, someone who did a ‘brilliant job’, and as a ‘beautiful, brave woman’ (BBC News, 2022). Takoush has been remembered through the eyes of the BBC journalist he was with at the time of his death, and that journalist's subsequent trauma.

As in our previous sections, our work here suggests an entanglement between the norms of journalists interested in covering conflict and the norms of the humanitarian world in which they circulate. In this context, these norms function as a distinctly Western cosmopolitan enterprise whose discursive exclusions resemble familiar material ones.

New friends

Taken together, we argue that these dynamics point to conflict journalism having increasingly ‘moved into’ a new professional home in the discursive world of humanitarianism, and that this process has been in motion for some time. It may also be uneven across different forms of conflict reporting. The possibility that elements of conflict journalism are finding a professional home amongst humanitarians provokes a range of empirical and theoretical questions.

Empirically, if we have reason to believe that a realignment of the sort we describe here might be happening, there will be value in determining to what extent and under what conditions such realignment takes place. To whom is access to secure humanitarian space granted, and under what conditions? Do different kinds of conflict scenarios, such as those having or lacking a secure international presence, affect the alignment of journalists and humanitarian actors in specific ways? How much is a closer working relationship between humanitarians and journalists simply a change in degree, continuous with a longer history of humanitarianism in fields such as photojournalism, rather than a matter of a new kind of relationship? Such matters can, we believe, be empirically determined and ought to be an area of interest for future work on the relationship between journalism and humanitarianism.

As discussed, empirical research in this field is rare. Studies hitherto have focused on the relationship between journalists and NGO employees as discrete entities, though increasingly researchers do acknowledge the ‘wide range of actors now involved in these forms of news making, including loose coalitions of INGOs, NGOs, and activists (Sireau, 2009); social media participants (McPherson, 2016); freelancers and their agents’ (Wright, 2016a, 2016b). Wright considers a coalition between NGOs and journalists, using the concept of the ‘moral economy’ (Sayer, 2007) of shared and/or negotiated values. Instead of taking an ethical approach informed by a political and moral economic heuristic, our argument focuses on the discursive conditions necessary for the construction of this new shared set of values where these actors meet. Our paper pushes Wright's arguments here further, to argue that the three shifts we point to together will likely make this kind of normative meeting of minds more and more likely to occur on humanitarian (moral) terms: i.e., that conflict journalism is becoming more humanitarian in its principles than humanitarian advocacy is becoming ‘journalistic’.

The complexities of conflict journalism shifting to embrace humanitarian norms complicate the lives of more than journalists and humanitarians. Fixers, for example, may find themselves having to navigate more complicated sets of economic and political relations as a result of such a realignment. Who a fixer is (seen to be) aligned with is complicated when working for a journalist who is in turn working for or with a humanitarian organisation. Moreover, the reciprocity enjoyed by journalists and humanitarians within a shared professional universe of ‘humanitarian journalism’ does not obviously extend to the existing fixer-precariat. Would a fixer, as a local civilian, be allowed into the protected infrastructure of the international archipelago? Or would they simply be excluded and replaced by NGO staff? With whom are fixers associated in the eyes of conflict parties when they work with journalists who work with humanitarians? These problems of ‘who is what’ are not simply matters of sociological hair-splitting – they can carry very real consequences for fixers, journalists and humanitarians as they work and travel under the gaze of actors committed to killing perceived enemies.

It is worth noting that for reporters from and operating in the global south, precarity is of a different order (Kotišová, 2023; Palmer, 2019), with fixers operating in a perpetual state of ‘socio-political precariousness’; in contexts such as the second Iraq war fixers might commonly be labelled ‘traitors’ for helping Western reporters (Palmer, 2019). We are concerned that the practical and normative convergence of journalism and humanitarian communications may complicate an already difficult-to-navigate social/political space. Those who work more closely with NGOs risk increased visibility; those who don’t cannot benefit from Western gatekeepers’ access to economic and other support. Ashraf describes the situation of such fixers as ‘hyper-precarity’, exacerbated by neo-colonial and exploitative conditions (Ashraf and Phelan, 2018: 3), compounded by their absence both from international journalism practice and from prominent academic and journalistic discourses of such practice.

Theoretically, the proposal that organised humanitarianism has increasingly ‘taken responsibility’ for conflict journalism raises further questions of its own. What obligations might humanitarians have to harbour and support the work of journalists? As a reasonably well-resourced party to a conflict with a principled commitment to human welfare (and in some cases witnessing norms), how far do humanitarians share norms with journalists in Wright's (2016a) sense of inhabiting the same moral economy, and what are the normative ideals in respect of which the two groups are actually incompatible? Discursively, how does the presence of journalists in humanitarian spaces affect how the journalist (and the humanitarian) is perceived? Shifting, connected identities (in the eyes of combatants) may introduce very real risks for humanitarians and journalists alike, but perhaps also create new possibilities for each that could not be pursued alone.

Significantly, we argue for a deeper understanding of the discursive hybridity and very practical interdependencies occurring as conflict journalism makes a new moral home feathered with humanitarian norms. The issues we have highlighted pose questions for the ways in which humanitarian organisations communicate and win trust in the field, and communicate their values or ‘missions’ to the public. The extent to which this humanitarian responsibility for journalism of conflict is discursively (re)mediated within institutional and social media, and in turn is communicated to audiences – those who traditionally engage with humanitarianism or news, respectively, or otherwise, is also worthy of elucidation. Equally, deeper questions emerge around the relationships of these institutions with non-state actors in the global south, especially fixers and local journalists – given the cultural and social contingency of these questions.

The modest proposal being made here is that there are at least three dimensions in which the subfield of conflict journalism is becoming increasingly aligned with professional humanitarianism, both materially and normatively. This, in turn, should prompt researchers to take seriously the possibility that this subfield of reporting might well be increasingly developing its professional and moral norms using experiences from the humanitarian domain rather than that of anything resembling a traditional newsroom – a pedagogical space which may in fact no longer practically exist for many conflict journalists.

Conclusion

We have discussed in this paper how the adoption of humanitarian norms by journalists of conflict is partly driven by precarity in the field; these professions now occupy a blended professional space, with an alignment of norms and objectives that draws substantially from the humanitarian arena. This finds physical expression in the shared physical and social spaces that journalists and humanitarian actors occupy in the field. We argue that this is partly fuelled by a new blended imaginary using humanitarian norms to reframe the work of journalists of conflict, such as is happening in the memory work of memorial foundations.

Taken together, these strands suggest an entanglement of the normative values of humanitarians and journalists. Existing language in the literature around the concept of ‘embedding’ fails to capture either the extent or the mixedness of this relationship. Typically embedding focused on military-style journalism has less to say about deep economic or normative ties, where journalists are actually working for the people who are sheltering them and giving them safe passage to and from certain situations. Moreover, thinking in terms of ‘embedding’ misses the longer term shifts in the imaginary of the entire subfield of conflict journalism as it adopts more humanitarian logics, as well as the consequences of these shifts for actors such as fixers.

If there was once a time when the war correspondent was socialised within a conventional news environment, where reporters imbibed ‘the norms of journalism’ and then went out to report on conflict, we argue in this paper that this is no longer the case. Those who replaced newsroom conflict journalists–the constellations of stringers and freelancers who spend a lot of time in conflict spaces – are no longer socialised in anything resembling a ‘normal’ newsroom. The social world to which they belong and the values which circulate around them are far closer to the norms of humanitarians and others who share the protected space in which these journalists circulate. Certain forms of journalism are moving house – both normatively and occasionally quite literally – out of the world of newsrooms, such that the resulting humanitarian journalism now inhabits the imaginaries of the humanitarian universe more than ever before. Reading these three strands together provokes urgent questions which we hope leads to an associated shift in journalism studies. To the extent that the norms of humanitarians and journalists align, there are conversations to be had between these groups about what a more effective relationship might be, given their shared humanitarian goals, and who bears the risks and reaps the rewards of a new alignment.

The arguments we have presented here also rely considerably on work being done outside of the subfield of journalism studies and in some cases outside of media and communications more broadly. The concepts of an ‘archipelago of international space’ and ‘Aidland’, for example, come from writers interested in the sociology of humanitarian interveners, rather than media or journalism. Conflict studies more broadly is also currently in the midst of a spatial turn that offers useful insights on how conflict space is both structured and structuring for those working in it (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Maltby et al., 2020). Scholars interested in the practices of media workers in sociologically specific settings (in this case, spaces of humanitarian intervention and armed conflict more broadly) can gain much from seeking out complementary work on those spaces in other fields. In a sense, there is value to seeing interdependency not simply in the object(s) of our interest as a field (journalists and media workers), but between our field and others.

There are of course some caveats to the arguments we present. ‘Aidland’ – the safe space of journalists of conflict living inside humanitarian space-exists in certain circumstances but not everywhere. Ukraine, at the time of writing, has no universally protected ‘international archipelago’ that spans both sides of the conflict and in which journalists can circulate. Consequently, our description of an internationalised protected space doesn’t exist in all situations or all situations equally. In Ukraine, we also see a very clear example that what was previously held to be true about the precarity of foreign reporting might not be as true when a conflict becomes financially viable for reporters in terms of news attention. The income of a freelancer working in Ukraine at the time of writing is quite different to the monthly earnings of a freelancer working in South Sudan or DRC when those conflicts are off the news cycle. The risks of depending on or associating with humanitarians, media organisations from different countries or journalists will also play out differently from conflict to conflict, depending on what is politically salient in each context (Sutton and Stupart, 2021).

Finally, we would add that the degree to which the common imaginary emerging is couched in Western journalistic terms in global NGOs is due in part to a West-centred humanitarianism dominating policy agendas transnationally. There are critiques to be made about where the humanitarian imaginary in conflict journalism that we describe here is centred, geopolitically speaking. Journalism studies of this subfield would do well to engage with existing critiques of humanitarianism as a colonial practice (Chouliaraki, 2013; Rieff, 2002) and to be aware of the inevitable interactions of these politics with ‘global’ journalism's own Western-centricity (Hanitzsch, 2019; Stupart, 2021a).

There is much work to be done.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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