Methodology of International Agency War Reporting: Promiscuity and Plurality (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Political Affairs Through the Lens of Russian Media

Abstract

It’s time to move past the assumed totality of ‘international’ war reporting as a global, rather than asymmetrical and translocal, field of journalistic practice. This paper outlines the methodological promiscuousness necessary to follow how international agency coverage –from AFP, AP, ITAR-TASS, Reuters, and RIA NOVOSTI– is characterized by patterns of conventionalized dependencies when on-the-ground reporting is obstructed by conflict, from citizen journalists to state and non-state sources, already circulating reporting and social media posts. A large-scale digital humanities approach mapping newswire metadata was developed to identify diverse case studies to highlight the changing conventions and genres of war reporting. This paper examines how applying a practice-based lens to critical discourse analysis provides the methodological flexibility for in-depth analysis and comparison across genres, from retrospective personal blogs of agency photojournalists to comparisons of ‘objective’ newswire bulletins in the first 24hrs of chemical weapons attacks, highlighting the limitations and stressors of international war reporting.

Author

• Kenzie Burchell, University of Toronto Scarborough