UC Santa Cruz

Meaningful Violence examines how journalists produce knowledge of war and the frictions – practical, ideological, and linguistic – inherent to war reportage. Based on two years of participant observation with journalists in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, this ethnography captures the lived experience of violence and its representation in the “war on terror” era. My aim is to challenge dominant conceptions of militarism by demonstrating how authority is constituted representationally. Attention to the practice of war reportage indicates that the confusions, intimacies, and distress inherent to the work of wartime journalism are displaced from the news journalists produce. While exposure to violence is professionally necessary, the effects of this experience are erased. This discursive repression shows how a normative order is imposed upon the representation of faraway conflict. Violence, I argue, is simultaneously commodified and disavowed by the practice of reporting war. The 2016-17 battle for Mosul provides a case study of the ideology of war reportage. Lauded journalism revealed US-coalition underestimates of civilian casualties from anti-Islamic State operations. Yet journalists failed to challenge the official rationale offered for this harm: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. Focusing on individuated suffering as the central problem of war – rather than the structures perpetuating suffering – journalists emphasized the morality of militarism while mystifying its political logic. I argue that war reportage, in its contemporary humanitarian mode, transforms war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent. Attending to the language of war reportage, I investigate the politics of common classifications, the symbolism of casualty counts, the byline’s elision of authorial presence, and related generic conventions. A discourse analysis of news industry “style guides” further indicates how journalistic language structures the performance of truth-telling. War reportage, I argue, is less a record of war than a result of linguistic conditions determining how war can be recorded. Finally, I explore possibilities endemic to journalism for thinking war anew. By considering the practice, ideology, and language of war reportage for what they conceal as well as what they sanction, opportunities for contesting hegemonic understandings of war can emerge.