Voice and testimony in conflict reporting

• In Event: The Ambivalence of Voice

Abstract

Testimonial voices of conflict, recorded on the mobile cameras of local participants in Syria or Libya (civilian or militants), have become an important part of war reporting. Similarly to past spectacles, these ‘amateur’ voices also invite us, viewing publics, to witness death as a moral event that requires a response. But, unlike the past where the journalist largely fact-checked and legitimized local testimonies, the new polyphony of conflict zones pluralizes our encounter with the death and suffering of war and poses new challenges to war reporting: who are these others? what stories can we tell about them? and what emotional and ethical response should we have towards them? By exploring how the voices of conflict are remediated in our news media, this presentation reflects on the implications that polyphonic witnessing has on the ethics of war journalism and on the politics of testimony in the digital age.

Author

• Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science