A New History of War Reporting

War Reporting focuses of the practice and performance of journalism in different societies and how the problems and issues of getting the story shape and determine the representation of war.

Reviewing recent literature from different countries on how war has been covered, Kevin Williams examines the debates and arguments around changes to war reporting in the global era, focussing on four themes: technological development, the growing emphasis on victims, the increased reflexivity of the media on how war is reported and greater emphasis on the visualisation of war.

Much of the current literature emphasises the ‘novelty’ of contemporary war reporting and how journalists cover war. This book will seek to provide an ‘antidote’ to the ‘fetishisation of novelty’ which characterises discussion of the media and journalism in the global era. There have been considerable changes, but many of the issues that face war correspondents such as how they access war, get their story back, engage with the representation of death and dying and identify their sources of information remain remarkably similar. How different reporters in different periods and societies have responded to these issues is drawn out through international, historical and comparative examples of the practice and performance of journalism at war. The book is organised around the theme of ‘getting the story’, with an emphasis on the how decisions about getting the story influence the nature of what the audience see, hear and read.

War Reporting will provide students with a thematically organised, but historically rich introduction to the nature and practice of war reporting, placing writing and representation of war in the context of the structural and institutional pressures which are exerted on journalists in the field.

Kevin Williams is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Swansea University.