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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

The end of the golden age of foreign news has rendered talk of ‘war correspondents’ something of an anachronism. Publications that keep dedicated staff interested in the world’s conflicts now tend to talk more in terms of a ‘humanitarian’ rather than ‘conflict’ journalism beat (Bunce, 2019; Scott et al., 2023). Outside of secure employment, an ever-increasing precariat with a professional interest in war goes by a mix of appellations that range from ‘journalist’ prefixes (conflict journalist, humanitarian journalist) to identities that ground the work in documentary film and photography, art, or advocacy. Where once there may have existed a defined professional community of correspondents, such as that chronicled in Pedelty’s (2013) ethnography of journalists covering the war in El Salvador, the journalism of war now persists as a far more diffuse field of professional work. In it, one may be a news photojournalist at one moment, a photographer in the employ of a humanitarian organization at the next (Wright, 2016), and a documentarian or art photographer in the context of a formal exhibition or retrospective at some later juncture.

Despite this balkanization of the work of reporting on war and its disintegration as a formal category of correspondent, it remains a community with a distinct professional identity. What the death of war and conflict reporting as a dedicated beat in most newsrooms has meant, however, is that the work of imagining who a ‘conflict journalist’ is and what normative commitments bind the field is now only indirectly the product of formal journalistic training or newsroom socialization. After all, few of those involved in reporting war now experience anything like a traditional career trajectory working their way through the pedagogical environment of a formal news organization (Shah et al., 2023). Rather, the field is increasingly constituted by precaritized media workers from eclectic backgrounds, running the gamut from self-organizing ‘citizen’ journalists and publications created within conflict spaces (Nicolson and Rollins, 2019; Sambrook, 2010) to aspiring journalists from non-conflict countries seeking professional success through covering wars in other places.

Yet, if the ideological work that binds journalists of conflict together as a distinct subfield is no longer being done within newsrooms or the formal spaces of traditional media organizations, where is it taking place? That is to say, where is the work of maintaining a post-war-correspondent imaginary being done – in Taylor’s (2002: 106) sense of how a community of conflict-focused media practitioners imagine themselves, their relations with each other and outsiders, and the underlying norms around which their field is based?

In this article, we explore one location where this imaginary is constructed: the memorialization work of conflict foundations, trusts and other non-profit entities charged with establishing and coordinating the legacies of journalists killed in the course of their work.

In the case of memorial organizations managing the legacies of journalists of conflict, we argue that their accounts of dead journalists’ lives work to construct them as ‘secular, cosmopolitan saints’. This is accomplished through the use of supererogatory quasi-religious language that frames reporters’ practices through a cosmopolitan, humanitarian moral lens (Chouliaraki, 2013). Despite their virtuous discourse, however, we argue that such foundations act as gatekeepers wielding the power of elite networks to redescribe risky work as a source of professional virtue at the same time as they fashion a moral discourse of the conflict journalist as a sainted figure.

Foundations as sites of memory work

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag (2003: 85) makes the observation that:

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction . . . What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

As Sontag’s caution implies, foundations are not simply a repository for ‘our’ collective memory of journalism’s heroes, but actively construct these legacies. In particular, posthumous foundations wield a particular form of authority for shaping discourse around normative values by virtue of their position at the place where rhetoric about norms meets death. The death of the journalist, constructed as being in pursuit of some normative ideal, invests that ideal with the particular – and powerful – moral authority available to the martyr. As Peters (2001) notes, the willingness to die in service of the truth lends a particular (if expensive) credibility to practices of witnessing. The death of the journalist – articulated as being in pursuit of noble ethical commitments – serves as an affirmation of the rightness of the cause. No story is worth dying for, the cliché goes. But some principles might be.

Journalistic foundations’ roles in constructing discursive repertoires (Wetherell and Potter, 1988) around these principles is underexamined in the literature, given foundations’ centrality as a normative organizing force. As Scott et al. (2019) point out, research on foundations is presently almost entirely about their effects on journalistic autonomy (see also Browne, 2010; Ferrucci and Nelson, 2019). In the case of memorial foundations, we argue for additional effects in terms of the discourse of foundations that are ideally placed to speak to and on behalf of certain subfields of journalism.

Here our use of discourse draws on our methodological use of Critical Discourse Analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 67, Fairclough, 2000), in which we view text as socially situated within particular orders of discourse with which it is dialectically connected (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 67). We offer an argument that the discursive work of foundations is implicated in how conflict journalism imagines itself, alongside the material effects of funding and organizational control that existing work has pointed to. In this respect, we follow Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s (2014) observation that journalism as a field is very much engaged in memory work – in this case, about itself – and extend this idea to the world of memorial foundations specifically.

The power to speak for the dead

The power to articulate journalists’ deaths with normative principles is of course not universally available, given that it requires, in part, being able to credibly claim knowledge of the kinds of principles that led them to risk their lives. As a result, the voices that typically speak on behalf of the dead, articulating what they did with what they believed, are often those who could most plausibly lay claim to know what was in their hearts, morally speaking: family, close friends and colleagues with whom they endured the trials of reporting war and violence.

Beyond this ability to plausibly ‘speak on behalf of’ the dead, still more is required. Social and political capital of various kinds, as well as finance and access to a public sphere (ideally in the broadest sense, but certainly to publics of fellow journalists) are all key elements in determining whether the discursive work that foundations engage in can be successfully enacted around some particular death. In Bourdieusian terms (Bourdieu, 1996), these forms of capital also go some way to explaining the generally white, Euro-American hegemony of major foundation-type projects, despite the memorialization of those killed covering conflict being common among journalists across the world. This observation that journalistic imaginaries retain a bias towards privileged Euro-American definitions of the field is by now a well-established observation among both journalists and academics (Stupart, 2021a; Hanitzsch, 2019; Nothias, 2020).

These memorial foundations, we argue, are unique in their economic and cultural power to construct the journalism of conflict and do the work of morally justifying this increasingly precarious form of work. In this observation, we join a growing literature on the discursive work surrounding journalistic deaths. For example, Carlson’s (2006) study of the death of NBC reporter David Bloom and Washington Post reporter Michael Kelly, argues for the importance of narratives of bravery, volunteerism, sacrifice and witnessing. In addition, Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s (2014) influential Journalism and Memory maps out various forms of memory work around the commemoration of journalists – an approach that we extend here to foundations.

Methodology

Five critical case studies were selected, focusing on cases of Western journalists of conflict who died while working in conflict zones. The studies were chosen as examples of significance: where the social and political circumstances of the selected institutions are likely to have ‘the greatest impact on the development of knowledge’ (Patton, 2001: 236). The use of these case studies may point to different discursive patterns of social practices around collective memory relating to journalists of conflict, even if not approaching the generalizability of natural scientific theory (Ragin and Zaret, 1983). Such ‘ideal types thus occupy a middle ground between the uniqueness of historical events and the generality of laws’ (p. 732).

The chosen cases raise obvious concerns about focusing on the memorialization of a handful of Euro-American journalists over the wider diversity of memorialization practices for journalists killed in conflict worldwide. Mindful of such critiques, it is not our intention to suggest any kind of universality based on the case of Western memorial foundations, but rather to point to a very specific series of articulations that appear to be common to foundation language in this context, connected to genealogies of humanitarianism, religious martyrdom and witnessing that are particular to it. Indeed, we think it entirely likely that the repertoires present in memorial discourses may be entirely different in other contexts.

Secondly, our focus on Euro-American foundations is in line with our earlier critique that the various capitals required to grant memorial organizations power in the construction of conflict journalism are disproportionately concentrated in the communities of Western media. It is no coincidence that the deaths of some on our list of cases have resulted in feature films, extensive public engagement programmes and material support for organizations involved in journalism safety and training. To the extent that geopolitical context has helped to ensure the hegemony of foundations from this part of the world, there is value in examining what the content of that hegemony in fact is. With these caveats, the five case studies we have chosen – Marie Colvin, ¹ Tim Hetherington, ² Camille LePage, ³ James Foley ⁴ and Chris Allen ⁵ – have been selected precisely because they represent cases of the kind of hegemonic constructions that this project is interested in. The journalists chosen all have prominent, public foundations with a corpus of widely available data for discourse analysis. They were picked to cover a range of male and female, Euro-American nationalities, with those selected dying in different parts of the world and under different circumstances. They produced work across a range of media and their passing received significant media attention. The journalists chosen were all established practitioners at the time of their deaths, though were a range of ages. All were killed between 2010 and 2020, a significant enough time to allow for a range of examples, yet recent enough for the findings to be relevant. By focusing on white, Euro-American journalists, we acknowledge the lack of diversity of our subjects, but see this whiteness as linked to particular forms of social and financial capital that we seek to unpack and understand.

Each is an example of a memorial foundation 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 global ‘periphery’. In this way, our approach is one of theoretical sampling (Bryman, 2012: 194; Cohen and Arieli, 2011; Saunders et al., 2018): we have attempted to collect cases with certain financial and political resources, to see what might be common in the repertoires they employ. The landscape of foundations established in memory of deceased conflict journalists is substantially dominated (financially and discursively) by those examined here, making these cases a reasonable window into this memorial work for at least hegemonic conceptions of conflict journalism as they exist in the Euro-American journalistic field.

In choosing our examples, an initial analysis of text on the Daniel Pearl Foundation ⁶ was distinct in many respects from the other examples included in this analysis. We observed several ways in which his memory is constructed primarily via a rhetoric around professional journalistic – as opposed to moral, humanitarian norms. Our view was that this was the result of a particular moment in modern conflict reporting, after which the humanitarian register ascended. For this reason, our study addresses this emergence of memorializing journalists as moral agents, by focusing on the latter cases.

From each foundation, texts were taken from the ‘about the journalist’ and ‘foundation aims’ pages of their websites and were coded inductively using thematic analysis to identify appropriate themes relating to how journalists and their work were understood and valued. The resulting material was then interrogated in more detail using a critical discourse analysis approach. These specific webpages were selected due to their functions within memorial foundation websites: ‘about’ pages being a setting specifically for constructing the life of the deceased and ‘aims’ pages generally doing the work of linking foundations’ active work to the principles and presumed or actual wishes of the journalists themselves. The themes that emerged map on to the subsections of our findings as below: ‘the moral saint’; ‘the humanitarian cosmopolitan’; ‘the witness’; and ‘voice’, with sub-themes in each. During the critical discourse analysis of page themes, we were particularly interested in the lexical choices that these websites made in explaining the motivations of the deceased to become journalists of conflict, and the implied or explicitly claimed ‘value’ of the work (Van Leeuwen, 1996). This formed part of a more general interest in language used to construct the journalism of conflict in distinctive moral terms – how is death made sense of and valorized?

Saints, cosmopolitans, witnesses and the voiceless

In the sections that follow, we reflect on four repertoires that appeared across almost all of the cases examined. First, we outline evidence of a ‘moral saint’ repertoire, in which the deceased is typically characterized as morally supererogatory, going above and beyond the requirements of general ethical norms and described using idioms that draw from religious metaphor in a non-specific way, potentially to align with funders’ missions (McGoldrick, 1984). Second, we argue for the existence of a ‘humanitarian cosmopolitan’ repertoire (Chouliaraki, 2013), articulating presumptions of universal equality and the journalist as a privileged cosmopolitan agent engaged in helping sufferers in foreign lands. Third, in the repertoire of ‘the witness’, we describe a discourse of witnessing and – in particular – an active, vocational responsibility to ‘bear witness’ and speak on behalf of those imagined (in cosmopolitan terms) to be ‘over there’, away from the comfort and safety of the journalists’ own countries (Stupart, 2021a). Finally, in the repertoire of the ‘giver of voice’, we observe a conception of the journalist as a communicative benefactor: the giver of voice to the voiceless.

Taken together, these interconnected discourses construct a justification for the journalism of conflict as a uniquely praiseworthy form of cosmopolitan witnessing (Chouliaraki, 2013). Journalists of conflict are given an elevated moral status based on the supererogatory nature of their work, whose challenges and sacrifices are cast in an often religious tone, resulting in the construction of a kind of modern cosmopolitan saint – one who leaves a comfortable, middle-class life behind to bear witness to the suffering of the world, while eliding the complications of, inter alia, geopolitics and privilege.

The moral saint

The construction of the journalist as a moral hero redescribes the conflict journalist as one who undertakes supererogatory moral acts, where a supererogatory moral act is understood as something that is morally praiseworthy to do, but which nobody can reasonably be asked to undertake. The supererogatory moral agent acts ‘with the highest possible moral evaluation . . . though their performance is seldom, if ever, considered obligatory’ (McGoldrick, 1984: 523) –including being exposed to physical harm.

Unsurprisingly, reporting on war is often implicitly constructed in a supererogatory way, given the unreasonable levels of risk that such ‘good work’ is typically understood to entail. In the case of memorial foundation texts, this articulation is typically achieved through highlighting the leaving of a ‘normal’, ‘safe’ home life/world and heading out into ‘dangerous’ places to do work that is morally valuable. For example, photojournalist Camille Lepage was born in Angers, France in 1988 and worked across Egypt, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, where she was killed in 2014. LePage’s foundation site describes her entry into journalism in a mythological register:

Camille Lepage has matured in the shadow of the castle of Angers, in the warmth of the city walls. But at the time of entering her adult life, she chose to confront herself with a mountain . . .

Lepage’s life is described in missionary language of adventure and religiosity – of leaving the relative safety of a walled city before venturing into the unknown, the classic ‘hero’s journey’ (Campbell, 2014). The ‘mountain’ is redolent of the Gospel and/or Biblical equation between moving mountains and overcoming adversity, of virtuosity and agency in the face of overwhelming strength, longevity and immutability. Lepage’s foundation was founded by her family to promote her work, and to support photojournalists in countries of conflict. It has five staff listed on its website, including her mother, father and brother. It solicits private donations – as do non-profits with similar aims, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists – but it is not clear whether the foundation is supported by public money.

Elsewhere, photographer and journalist Chris Allen’s life is memorialized explicitly in terms of his moral acts, while retaining the overall narrative form of leaving the comfort of home life in pursuit of hardship. Allen grew up in Philadelphia, studied at Oxford University in the UK, before reporting on Ukraine, and later South Sudan, where he was killed in 2017. The following section on the website memorializing his life describes how Allen acted alongside those he photographed.

He lived as they did, slept alongside the rebels in mud huts, ate community meals and shared their water. Chris sacrificed comfort, suspended judgement, and simply observed. He immersed himself fully.

Allen’s intentions are elided with those of his subjects, overlooking the structural and positional differences between them – ‘he lived as they did’ eliding, for example, the journalist’s ability to leave the scene of conflict at his discretion. His sacrifice of comfort is aligned with the ‘mud huts’ of the rebels whom he worked alongside, redolent of the humility and tolerance of Western classical liberalism. Humility is a central virtue in Judeo-Christian religions, both in Hebrew scripture and the New Testament (Dunnington, 2019). Humility has also been identified as an important trait for NGO leaders as ‘normative of good character . . . predictive of positive outcomes’, is collaborative, and as striving for the common good (Wang et al., 2021). Either way, his memorial page solely promotes the Christopher Allen Prize for Writing as its main project, which quotes Allen as seeking to be ‘as close as possible’ to war, not to see it ‘from some proverbial hill’.

The prize aims to celebrate work that gives ‘voice to those who were unheard’. The online memorial affiliates itself to organizations including Reporters without Borders, Justice for Journalists, the Rory Peck Trust and the Committee to Protect Journalists, all of whom campaign for the protection of journalists.

In these two examples, the language being used – of humility and being mission-focused – parallels Christian ideals of a ‘kenotic’ Christ, who renounced the protections of divinity in order to get closer to the human world. This borrowing of religious language, idiom and moral framework fits with the observations of previous authors about the connections made between these forms of civil society work and ethico-moral or religious discourses.

Peters (2001), for example, has pointed to one of the genealogical roots of witnessing lying in practices of religious martyrdom, especially in its characterization as ‘a calling’ or ‘a mission’ that involves turning one’s back on a comfortable future in a peaceful nation. Sontag (2003), too, reflects on the religious connotations in war photography in particular, pointing out that, ‘To feel the pulse of Christian iconography in certain wartime or disaster-time photographs is not a sentimental projection.’ Yet such moral positions are not open to everyone – as we will see through our consideration of the normalization of the languages of humanitarian cosmopolitanism.

The humanitarian cosmopolitan

An articulation of the journalist as humanitarian cosmopolitan adventurer was pervasive through many of the foundation texts we examined, a repertoire which serves to valorize the idea of the journalist covering conflict as a kind of cosmopolitan saviour or agent of justice. Camille Lepage is one such valorized cosmopolitan humanitarian. On the biography page of Camille Lepage: on est ensemble, ‘we are together’, one can read:

She chose to cast off the moorings and open her eyes wherever her pen and lens could be used as an offering to the forgotten victims.

Lepage is constructed as an urbane, globally mobile adventurer who confronts an apathetic media disinterested in conflict: an agent who makes a moral decision to witness the ‘forgotten’. The text, written in English for a global audience, veers into exaggeration – there is a long history of war reporting in France, with Catherine Leroy, Francoise Demulder and Christine Spengler among Lepage’s antecedents. The metaphorical casting off of ‘moorings’ invoking the safe berth of a ship, suggestive of stability and the ability to set off on ‘voyages’ (whose colonial history as a metaphor is scarcely disguised). That her pen and lens are presented as an ‘offering’ to the forgotten is a peculiarly sacralizing vocabulary which dissimulates the relations of power that conflict reporting enacts. After all, no pen or lens is being offered to them, quite as much as their suffering is being offered to the foreign reporter’s home audience.

Meanwhile, US journalist and video reporter James Foley’s biography is similarly constructed around a story of cosmopolitan privilege and humanitarian impulse. Foley was abducted in Syria in 2012 before being killed by Islamic State two years later.

By becoming a conflict journalist, Jim was able to merge his interest in writing with his compassion for the poor, disadvantaged, and suffering amid conflict. I told my son I wished he had gotten to know Jim Foley, whose kindness and humanity had such an impact when he was here on earth and whose incredible legacy has impacted millions around the globe.

James W. Foley envisioned a world that respected the dignity and life of each person, regardless of socioeconomic status, cultural background or nationality.

Foley’s ‘interest in writing’ is privileged alongside his ‘compassion for the poor’ – with his vocational interest in journalism given equal billing to his moral duty to this aforementioned unspecified ‘poor’, described in generic terms alongside those ‘suffering amid conflict’. His views on ‘respecting the dignity and life of each person regardless of socioeconomic status’ is an appeal to basic principles of cosmopolitan humanitarianism.

This repertoire of the journalist as a humanitarian cosmopolitan is an instance of Chouliaraki’s (2013: 45) 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’. It is an idea of cosmopolitanism that evinces ‘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) and a moral project in which the journalist is valorized for seeking out the ‘voiceless’ and acting as their representative in a cosmopolitan moral commons.

The witness

If the conflict journalist is being constructed as a cosmopolitan humanitarian in terms of how they see the world and a sainted, supererogatory moral agent in their pursuits, what is the actual work that they are doing being described as? In talking about the work journalists were engaged in, the language and structure of witnessing as described by Peters (2001) would frequently surface, often quite directly. In these lexicalizations, we see journalists articulated as bearing witness in the service of the suffering, as called to this work (in a vocational, non-specifically religious sense) and, finally, as martyrs in the sense of having died in the service of this calling to witness.

In the following quotation, we see the role of the journalist as bearing witness to the suffering of others. Occasionally, as here, this claim is explicit:

My job is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village. (Marie Colvin)

More often, however, it is made through describing the work of the journalist as that of an intermediary between those in an imagined world of violence and injustice and those who ought to know their plight. Such articulations would typically describe a general schema in which the journalist acts as a witness between spaces of suffering and an audience of potential humanitarian helpers.

This witnessing work, moreover, is overwhelmingly described in vocational terms. Rather than being accidental witnesses or bearing witness as a form of work, journalists are variously described as being on a mission, pursuing a vocation or answering a challenge:

Camille Lepage’s mission was to transmit to the world, through her photos, information on the living conditions of populations in great suffering and living in countries in conflict with little or no media coverage. (Camille LePage)

At Marquette [University], he made life-long friends and was challenged to serve the voiceless. (James Foley)

Tim Hetherington’s mission to create a better understanding of the world cast him in many roles: photojournalist, filmmaker, human rights advocate, artist and a leading thinker in media innovation. (Tim Hetherington)

The idea of pursuing a vocation, embarking on a (principled) mission or answering a great moral challenge itself has a deep religious history in the tales of those who serve God or the church, returning us once more to a religious register. The root, vocare, in fact means ‘to call’ in Latin. Just as the priest is ‘called’ by God to serve him, instead of his own desires, so do we see these modern-day saints called to bear witness – understood as an explicitly noble moral endeavour:

‘These are people who have no voice,’ she said. ‘I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. (Marie Colvin)

Reporters are passive in these texts, urged on to a calling by an unnamed nominative. They are not called by God, but by an unnamed Platonic ‘good’ which remains absent and unarticulated. Some of these vocational discourses regarding bearing witness have more explicit religious overtones, while others gesture less directly to missionary histories and language. When James Foley decides at university to pursue charity work, ‘he was challenged to serve the voiceless’, though the person/people challenging him remains ambiguous. Marie Colvin grapples with a moral duty to the voiceless which she cannot ignore.

What is demanded of the journalist in responding to the call of this duty to do good is a great deal. The sacrifice of a counterfactual life with a comfortable career and happy family, the demands that they ‘immerse [themselves] fully’ (Chris Allen) in worlds of suffering and injustice, and the risk – ultimately realized – that they might die in the course of bearing witness. Being willing to risk one’s body – and death – in the name of bearing witness is, as Peters (2001) reminds us, the occupation of the martyr. We are reminded from biography to biography that the deceased responded to – and died in pursuit of – a moral duty that few have the courage to take up. To risk one’s life, or (phrased less agentically) to be at risk becomes a noble moral endeavour. The danger of reporting on conflict becomes the material from which the journalist as a martyred witness can be constructed, while simultaneously eliding – in the canonical biographies of the dead, at least – the idea that it need not have been this way, that these journalists might have been failed by others, or that the power relations of the field might call practices of witnessing into question, morally speaking.

The giver of voice

Discourses employed by the foundations constructed their vision not just in terms of the memorialization of particular journalists, but in terms of those journalists’ work ‘giving voice’ to others. Necessarily, we must be wary of claims regarding the provision of voice via the work of media practitioners, charities and civil society organizations, particularly if those voices are given on the terms of those claiming to give them (Carpentier, 2016).

Marie Colvin, as one example, was born to a middle-class family in Queens, New York, going on to work most famously as a correspondent for London’s Sunday Times. She was killed by an artillery strike in February 2012 while reporting on the Syrian Civil War. Her death was widely mourned by political figures and journalists at the time, and her life has been subsequently immortalized in both books and the war drama biopic A Private War in 2018.

The foundation established in her name now focuses on journalistic education through, inter alia, reforming policy relating to journalism in conflict, assisting in humanitarian aid and creating global awareness of both atrocities and the difficulties faced by journalists reporting conflict. It has coordinated the Marie Colvin Film Series, which included a screening at London’s Frontline Club and supported both a Colvin fellow at NPR and a Marie Colvin Distinguished Lecture Series at Stonybrook University.

On her foundation’s ‘about’ page, she is described as saving the lives of 1,500 women and children trapped in a United Nations compound being attacked by Indonesian-backed forces in 1999 in East Timor.

She was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were trapped in a United Nations compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them when UN staff and journalists were evacuated, and continued to send news out of the compound, highlighting the plight of the refugees to the world. Embarrassed by Marie’s powerful reports, the U.N. reversed its decision to leave the innocent behind, and evacuated them to safety.

That Colvin ‘refused to leave them’ highlights the difference in agency between Colvin, a cosmopolitan and mobile journalist from New York, and the refugees, who remain massified, unidentifiable and voiceless. Colvin’s decision to stay behind in service of others is described as unusual: it is both a supererogatory moral act in the sense reflected on in the previous section, and an act of cosmopolitan humanitarianism. She stays to tell the world what is happening, and in so doing saves the lives of the ‘women and children’ who would otherwise be abandoned to violence.

This description of Colvin’s work in East Timor is what Bakhtin via Chouliaraki (2008) describes as adventure (p. 97), whereby the author of this text fails to provide a background for the events it describes – there is no narrative description of what and how the refugees in East Timor came to be in these circumstances. The reflection exists to articulate the journalist as a straightforward moral hero to those who suffer in the manner familiar to a cosmopolitan humanitarian imaginary.

Meanwhile Foley – as with Colvin and LePage – is presented similarly as a cosmopolitan humanitarian, engaged in ‘giving others voice’ as a means to addressing suffering and injustice.

His life demonstrated an uncompromising commitment to the freedom of the press and advocacy for basic human rights . . . Jim was known for his caring and joyful spirit, commitment, and bold idealism in an often cynical world. He gave a voice to those marginalized by poverty and conflict. Jim befriended them, listened to their stories and advocated for them. Jim was driven by a deep compassion for those without a voice.

Discourses of voice are repeated multiple times in this short text on the pages of the James W Foley foundation website under ‘About Jim’ banner – when the page is clicked on, piano music plays. As with Colvin, it is immediately contextually unclear who these voiceless might be – Foley is the agent in all these constructions.

Foley’s foundation identifies its ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ to advocate for the release of US hostages and for the physical safety of journalists. It achieves this by developing curricula for journalism degree programmes and by increasing access to safety training, medical insurance and security information. According to the most recently published annual report, its donors include the New York Times, Paypal, the Washington Post and Walmart, with revenue of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the case of Allen, we see a similar pledge to help those ‘in the shadows’ who are ‘unheard’ – Allen acts as the intermediary between them and their new audience, though again, the identities of these massified individuals are unknown.

[Chris Allen] told the stories of those in the shadows of violence and conflict and gave voice to those who were unheard.

Discourses of voice and voice-giving are employed as motivating the values and missions of these journalistic organizations, agentively situating the journalists in question as cosmopolitan humanitarians, though their biographies often elide the identities of those who were helped within the text themselves. These repertoires of voice echo those on the websites of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, that seek to create ‘One Voice for Equality’ or ‘Voices for Justice’ in their campaigning work.

Conclusion

Having argued for the existence of four repertoires – the saint, the cosmopolitan, the witness and the giver of voice – as features of the contemporary memorialization of conflict journalists, what might that tell us about the evolution of the field of conflict journalism and the value of memorialization projects such as these within it?

It has, after all, remained an exceedingly dangerous subfield: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at the time of writing some 37 journalists had been killed with a confirmed motive in 2022. ⁶ Some 2,500 have been killed since 1990. In May 2022, CPJ’s president Jodie Ginsberg said: ‘Often having the word “press” on your back or on your front was seen as a form of protection. Now there’s a concern that it makes you an actual target.’

Conflict journalism as a humanitarian endeavour

It is likely not a coincidence that the repertoires we have identified here also suffuse the social life of institutional humanitarians proper. As Rieff’s (2002) account of the rise of humanitarianism in the West makes clear, principles of charity, cosmopolitan ethics and witnessing are common in modern humanitarian discourse. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for example, explicitly acknowledges a principle of témoignage (witnessing) as part of their work, ⁷ and was explicitly founded as a cosmopolitan ethical project after the disillusionment of doctors and journalists during the Biafran war.

It is curious then, that the lives and work of conflict journalists so closely resemble the language of the humanitarian social world – that they are celebrated, in effect, for having been good humanitarians, rather than good journalists. Or, rather, that the categories collapse into one another: that to be a good humanitarian is (now) to be a good journalist. We would argue that this discursive similarity points to a colonization of this subfield of journalism by the norms and categories of humanitarianism: that the norms of the field of conflict journalism are increasingly humanitarian ones.

The discursive overlap that we identify here goes hand in hand with overlaps of other kinds. Precarity in the work of foreign correspondence in general and conflict reporting in particular already leads to a range of material overlaps between the two communities. Journalists moonlight as humanitarian photographers (Wright, 2016), while newsrooms have shed staff to humanitarian communications roles for decades (Orgad, 2013; Wright, 2018). Moreover, when working in the contexts of many contemporary conflicts, humanitarian organizations are often gatekeepers to a fortified ‘archipelago’ (Duffield, 2010) of safe space that includes accommodation, flights and security which journalists may make use of under certain conditions (Stupart, 2021b). In a world in which conflict journalists are increasingly living with, depending on, and being paid by humanitarian organizations, is it really surprising that journalists covering conflict would gradually come to see the world (and themselves) as their hosts do?

If our thesis about humanitarian discourses pervading conflict journalism is correct, it should prompt us to think more seriously not just about how journalism is changing, but where the locus of control over this process actually lies. Much literature on the future of journalism takes for granted that norms are in some sense in the hands of editors, news media owners and other traditional holders of a stake in professional journalism. But if the reality is that for many forms of the work, institutions have lost economic and social control over actual journalists through making them increasingly freelance, ad hoc and precarious, then those journalists now live (materially and socially) in other worlds now (Stupart, 2020) – akin to Peters and Broersma’s (2013: 3) observation of the ‘de-industrialization of journalism’ and the end of the 20th-century newsroom as the place where journalism happens, sociologically speaking. In the case of conflict reporting, it may be the case that the locus of control over how the subfield imagines itself (and its future) is in fact being as or more strongly inflected by the norms and logic of professional humanitarianism than professional journalism. If something like this is happening for other forms of journalism too, its future might look more like an archipelago of different normative communities, with the work of media organizations becoming more of a matter of brokering a common practice between them.

Giving sense to experience

The memorialization of journalists also helps make sense of the phenomenological experience of conflict reporting. Given the affective and emotional difficulty of the work (Stupart, 2021b), these findings suggest that foundation rhetoric might play a role in organizing these experiences in a way that gives them value. Understood this way, the story of the journalist as a secular cosmopolitan saint articulates experiences of risk, danger and hardship into a story of moral valour while eliding the structural causes of these experiences.

This interpretation resembles Illouz’s (2008) description of therapeutic language organizing emotional experience in the US in the 20th century. This provided a schema through which to make sense of feeling and allowed that feeling to become convertible into useful social capital. We would argue that the virtuous memorialization of conflict journalists does similar work. For the deceased journalist, foundations convert the fact of the deceased’s phenomenological experience in life into cultural capital upon which other projects can be pursued (speaking tours, scholarships, etc). The life (and death) of the virtuous journalist underwrites the authority of the foundation in their absence. For those journalists who remain, this work of organizing and valorizing reporting on war and suffering provides the discursive context for converting their own hardships into an elevated status among their peers.

Some caveats

In the texts under consideration, there are clearly politics of gender and class that have not been explored here. Quasi-religious language is often used to elide the positional differences between journalists and the subjects of their reportage. Journalists are described as humanitarian agents, with deep moral and vocational motivations for successfully abandoning their class positions and venturing abroad – a story that does more to conceal the power dynamics between foreign conflict reporters and those they deal with than it reveals.

These cases come from privileged Euro-American contexts by design and many were university educated – some in very elite contexts – Hetherington in the University of Oxford after private school, Colvin at Yale, Pearl at Stanford. After graduating from college and venturing into photojournalism or journalism, descriptions of their biographies imply that alternative, stable white-collar careers in banking, law or medicine available to middle-class graduates are lost in favour of something more morally praiseworthy. This entrenches the binary between journalists of conflict as ‘morally good’ and supererogatory, but with a classed assumption around the ’sacrifices’ being made.

War and the reporting of it remains an urgent and important endeavour. Yet, honours are never without politics. Understanding the terms through which war reporting’s heroes are constructed might yet tell us something important about the moral universe in which the subfield is practising – and the interests that this may or may not serve.