[Commlist] New book: Conflicted: Making News from Global War

New book, Conflicted: Making News from Global War 
<https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=36485>, from Stanford University Press.

An ethnography of journalists covering recent conflicts in Iraq, 
Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine, the book provides a first-hand account 
of the practice of journalism in war zones and offers a critical 
analysis of the production of news on violence.

 From the press blurb:

How is popular knowledge of war shaped by the stories we consume, what 
are the boundaries of this knowledge, and how are these boundaries 
policed or contested by journalists producing knowledge from war zones? 
Based on years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and 
Ukraine, /Conflicted/ challenges normative conceptions of war by 
revealing how representational authority comes to be. Turning the lens 
on journalists from /The New York Times/, /The Washington Post/, /The 
Wall Street Journal/, and other prominent publications, Isaac Blacksin 
shows why news coverage of contemporary conflict, widely presumed to 
function as a critique of excessive violence, instead serves to sanction 
official rationales for war.

Blacksin argues that journalism's humanitarian frame—now hegemonic in 
conflict coverage—serves to depoliticize and remoralize war, 
transforming war from an effect of policy on populations to a matter of 
violence against the innocent. Exploring the tension between experience 
and expression in conditions of violence, and tracking how journalists 
respond to dominant expectations of reality, /Conflicted/ tells the 
story of war, reporters, and the consequences of their convergence. As 
new wars, and new reportage, continue to shape our understanding of 
armed conflict, this book makes visible both the power and the 
particularity of war reportage.

"Blacksin's clear interpretive voice plies journalism's unconscious, 
bringing to the fore the fear and trauma that is excised from reporting. 
/Conflicted/ is a truly extraordinary book—written with aplomb, 
thoroughly researched, and thoughtful through and through. A landmark 
text in the literature on the mediation of war."

—Alex Fattal, author of Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and 
Capitalism in Colombia

"We live in an age of war and depend for our war stories on the men and 
women who serve as our witnesses. War reporters are a legendary breed 
whose vital work has gone largely unexamined—until now. /Conflicted/ is 
quite simply the most thorough, intelligent, and unflinching examination 
of conflict reporting ever attempted. Isaac Blacksin has been there and 
his provocative account made me nod in recognition, grin in 
appreciation, and shout in outrage. For those transfixed by war—and 
determined to learn how we really know what we think we know about 
it—this book is essential reading."

—Mark Danner, author of /Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War/ 
and /Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War/

Table of Contents:


Preface

Introduction: War's Lobby: The Displacements of Journalism in Wartime

Interlude: Cheapening Experience

Part I: The Language of War Reportage and Its Conditions

1Folklore of the Future: The Certainty of Journalistic Expression

2Visible System and Invisible Rules: Commodifying Common Sense

Interlude: Available Stories

Part II: The Meaning of War Reportage and Its Exclusions

3Extermination as Protection: Depoliticizing War, Remoralizing Violence

4Power Speaking to Truth: Struggles with the Problem of War

Interlude: What to Make of It

Part III: The Practice of War Reportage and Its Contradictions

5Writing Conflicts: The Tension Between Experience and Expression

6Agitation at the Margins: Return of the Journalistically Repressed

Interlude: Leaving Mosul

Conclusion: War's Exit: Entangled Possibility in the Age of Endless Conflict

Epilogue: From Mosul to Mariupol

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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