Thus I stood there, safe and sound, and let the furious tumult pass by me.
—JOHANN VON GOETHE
At the Classy Hotel in Erbil, in northern Iraq, journalists fill the bar and spill through the open-air café into a neon-lit lobby. Old hands murmur with colleagues from wars past; young freelancers compare notes on frontline access; camera equipment and battered notebooks lounge about. War is underway, and there is work to be done.
A long table sprawls through the lobby with chairs akimbo as journalists come and go. Plates are emptied and stacked and empty bottles of Almaza beer clank against errant silverware. Diane is laughing at Rami’s bad puns; Robert is gesticulating wildly over Liam’s incredulous smirk; Max and Behcet lean in close for furtive whispers. Peter quickly drains his beer before leaving to file against his deadline in Paris. Amy receives a call from her editor in New York and backs away to a quieter corner of the bar. Phones ping with messages from an aid worker in Dahook and a Czech diplomat in the know and a young engineer trapped in Mosul and tweeting wildly.1
I take a seat next to Mazar, a gruff local fixer who walks and talks at rough angles. Journalists remark among themselves, a bit too casually, that Mazar probably killed people during the bad Kurdish wars and that he would commit war crimes again if asked. It makes him good company for checkpoints, less so for dinner parties. Liam and Mazar are discussing the day’s events, the rules of luck and fate, the best approach to the story of two brothers trapped on either side of a vicious frontline. “There are many ways to die,” Mazar remarks, and then begins to list them: suicide bomber, car-borne suicide bomber, sniper round, mortar round, airstrike, IED, grenade from a drone, missile from a drone. Over at the bar, a journalist with long velvet hair becomes the vision of a corpse decayed.
The Classy Hotel is a space that appears through wars past while remaining unique in each iteration, a site of sociality and production poised on the edge of violence. Here one can observe the practices of journalistic meaning making: the testing of language, the trading of narratives, the processing of experience. The Classy Hotel plays the role in the recent war with the Islamic State that the Caravelle Hotel played in the war in Vietnam, that the Commodore played in the Lebanese Civil War, and the Holiday Inn in the Kosovo War, and the Hotel Palestine in the US invasion of Iraq, and the Gandamack Lodge in the war in Afghanistan. These spaces sustain war reportage as a situated and social activity, where a relationship between language, meaning, and practice is formed and reformed, and from which a certain culture emanates. At the Classy Hotel, war reportage can be observed not merely as a profession or a craft, but as a social world unto itself, a world engaged with the uneasy transposition of knowing war into telling war. As a central site of journalistic life in Iraq, the Classy Hotel stands for all those war-zone hotels looming behind the scenes of wars past. It is a place where journalism becomes journalism and journalists become journalists.2
If, as Jean Baudrillard (1995) insists, a war in Iraq, like the one he examined some thirty year ago, “did not take place”—if global audiences access war only through the mediations of news media, necessarily partial and interested and self-referential—then the Classy Hotel is one place where this war disappears behind its mediation. It is a place where ideas are exchanged among journalists, resources pooled, logistics plotted, networks enhanced, fears related, values compared, fantasies indulged, limitations realized. It is a place where journalists negotiate how the recent war with the Islamic State—the primary concern of the journalism examined in this book—“takes place” representationally or ceases to do so. Fieldwork in war zones complicates Baudrillard’s approach, and related arguments from Paul Virilio (2002) and others, by revealing the transfiguration of war into news of war—into a war that “did not take place”—and the realities effaced in the process.3
As endless war has become a global condition in the post–9/11 era, those producing the most prominent representations of war—the daily news—should know war well. But what journalists know of war is always transformed through the representations they produce, and through the erasures inherent to this transformation. In the chapters that follow, I attend to these erasures in journalistic production, looking at what war reportage displaces—those words not expressed, those meanings not made, those experiences not reported—in order to capture the particularity of war as rendered in the news today. The displacements inherent to war reportage throw into relief both the authority of journalism for ordering what war is, as well as the surplus to journalism agitating at the margins of war’s authoritative representation. For the boundaries of war’s reality, as policed by journalism, always produce an outside. War reportage can then be approached as a process of selection and appropriation and determination, a mastering of war that must excise what remains unsuited to an established discursive domain. While only particular meanings are constituted in war reportage, particular routines of production undertaken, particular names and numbers expressed, this process of delineation creates, as well, an excess to war reportage, an Other that both contrasts and contests a journalistic Self. What is reported of war, what is left out, and what, thereby, does war reportage allow its consumers to think?
In the Classy Hotel, knowing war transmutes into telling war. It is, thereby, a site crystalizing the three concerns treated in the chapters to come: the language, the meaning, and the practice of war reportage. The order imposed by journalistic language is affirmed in the discussions among journalists in the hotel lobby. How the events of war are named and classified, how authorship is apportioned, how bodies are counted, what makes a “good story”—such matters, subject to the constraints of linguistic convention, are negotiated among journalists in the places they live and socialize. And the contingencies of war’s representation, hidden by the standardization of journalistic language, become evident in what remains journalistically unexpressed.
The relations of power implicit to the meaning of journalism are also apparent at the Classy Hotel, where political and military officials converse with journalists over imported liquors while other subjects of war, and other participants in journalistic production, never appear. Who counts as a victim, whose violence is justified, which sources determine war’s truth: These elements of journalistic meaning are reflected in presence and absence at a hotel bar.
The experiences of war that challenge journalism’s normative narratives are often shared around the tables in the Classy Hotel lobby, where reflection on a day’s events reveals what cannot be reported. The practice of war reportage demands an encounter with war’s ambiguities, absurdities, and confusions, yet it is precisely these elements of war that are excised by the generic demands of war reportage. The hotel itself—a critical site of news production—is just another element of journalistic practice obscured in the news produced.
In examining the language, meaning, and practice of war reportage, this study reckons with what war reportage excludes: Those experiences erased from journalistic narrative, those meanings unsanctioned by journalistic authority, those things of war left undefined, unclassified, uncounted. The transformations of war through its reportage entail a series of displacements—displacements consequential to how war is represented and thereby understood. For war, as this book demonstrates, has a way of exceeding those boundaries that war reportage attempts to secure, and the task of what follows is to recover this remainder. Conflicted maps the restrictions imposed on reportage of war and the possibilities entangled in war reportage for knowing war anew.
What is the relationship between practice, meaning, and text under conditions of combat? How does this relationship respond to consumer demand for war’s reality? How is authenticity calibrated, truthfulness enforced, and authority claimed in the production of news about conflict?
The value of war reportage is premised, at the most basic level, on its direct transmission of the reality of ongoing warfare. War reporters “bear witness” to war, delivering the suffering, the ruin, the devastation unfolding in faraway lands. Transparency, accuracy, objectivity, facticity, verifiability: These are the normative ideals that still shape the broadest conceptions of what war reportage is and does, and these ideals underwrite journalistic claims to truth. In providing truthful stories of war, war reportage informs news consumers about what is happening amidst conflict and who is harmed by whose violence—about what war is. Through a set of established forms, discursive and embodied, war reportage renders war’s reality.
But what does this reality of war entail? A glance at the war reportage now being produced from places like Iraq and Syria, Sudan and Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, and in Ukraine and Gaza too, indicates a particular reality for contemporary warfare. It is a reality of victims and perpetrators, wherein the former are innocent sufferers of the latter’s unjustified harm. It is a reality in which violence, immanent and bodily, plays the most significant role in wartime events. It is a reality that can be categorized, defined, plotted, and thereby understood. It is a self-evident reality, the encounter with which—by journalists sent to “cover” conflict—allows for the transparent representation of war.
These elements comprise one way to infer war’s reality as delivered by contemporary war reportage. A point-by-point correspondence between the journalistic text and an extratextual occurrence offers us a means of assessing what war is like. But there remains another mode of account: that of a figural correspondence between the journalistic text and some domain of experience understood to be real. Thus, a victim of war reported in the news may correspond to Hawra, a girl pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building after an airstrike in Mosul. But this victim may also correspond to “Hawra”: a figural representative of victimhood and, thereby, of the truth of human suffering amidst the cruelty of wartime violence. That we can confirm two realities in this journalistic representation—one empirically perceivable and one discursively composed—does not reveal a clash between two varieties of truth so much as a certain simultaneity of war reportage as a truth-telling, meaning-delivering enterprise. War may be perceivable by journalists—it may be encountered, experienced, and narrated—but war, in its journalistic representation, also adheres to a coherency, an orderliness, determined by the matter of journalism itself. War reportage manifests both mimesis and figuration, both verisimilitude and conviction, both self-evidence and regulation.4
Hayden White, in a study of historical narrative, cuts to the quick of this matter: “What is at issue here is not, What are the facts? but rather, How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another?” (1978, 134). This book demonstrates how war reportage asks itself the first question while answering the second. What journalists do when they report from a war zone and how they make war intelligible through narrative is premised on coherence between the war encountered and the meanings journalistically produced. Yet in order for the facts of war to be adequate to normative understandings of war, those facts must indicate something beyond themselves. Hawra the fact must also be “Hawra” the figure. And thus, even as journalists may encounter a war where saving victims is indistinguishable from killing victims, where violence is less consequential than the nonviolent systems that perpetuate it, where conventional definitions and categories are inadequate to war’s events, this encounter must yet establish only those realities for war already acceptable to news consumers. Even as journalists may encounter confusing, ambiguous, or absurd answers to the question What are the facts?, they must still describe those facts in a manner that responds to—and thereby sanctions—expected explanations for war. A concern of this book, then, is to track the simultaneity of war reportage as both a factual enterprise and a figural one. My aim is to show how the meanings given in war reportage can constrain understandings of the reality of warfare; how the practice of war reportage can result in experiences exceeding what journalism can represent; and how the language of war reportage can constitute, and thereby order, what war is narrated to be. In so doing, Conflicted seeks to track the metamorphosis war undergoes through its reportage and to recover what is mystified, occluded, effaced thereby.
A central premise of this act of recovery is that the forms of war reportage will determine its contents. What could be called the content of journalism’s forms—the linguistic, ideological, and practical determinations of war reportage—becomes, I believe, the consequential matter in how war is made knowable within societies consuming news of war. My overarching site of inquiry is the relationship between content and form, between war’s represented reality and the narrative conventions, interpretive worldviews, and professional routines with which journalists engage. Even as the specificity of its content can shift between wars and among journalists, the form of war reportage—standardized through professional, institutional, and social pressures—allows a connection between war and a news-consuming public to be maintained. This connection authorizes a very specific way of knowing war. And in constituting what war is supposed to be, journalism enhances and reproduces a particular social order. While journalism, as Stuart Hall (1982) notes, appears to “speak for itself,” providing a natural reflection of war’s reality, it simultaneously renders invisible those struggles, codifications, and interests foundational to how war’s reality is rendered. Folding figuration into fact, the descriptive into the declarative, the social into the symbolic, journalism organizes war’s reality in relation to considerations operating far from the war zone. The forms of war reportage become autonomous of their content as they discipline war’s reality to suit a reigning common sense, at the same time displacing what that reality cannot accommodate.
To define war reportage as an institution or a narrative form or a set of practices does not itself answer the question of how war reportage shapes understandings of war—of what war, as reported, is. If, as Walter Benjamin (1968) suggests, the fate of a society is linked to the way stories are told, then how journalists tell stories of war becomes consequential beyond the content of representation and the specific event represented, and perhaps especially so regarding the wars perpetuated—militarily, economically, politically—by those societies consuming much of the news reported from recent war zones. For as war reporters produce news in relation to various linguistic, political, and practical dynamics, war reportage also produces symbols of an age. The innocent civilian, suffering corporeally and individually. The ruthless insurgent, employing a cruel violence illegitimate and unjustified. The hardened soldier, whose heroism is shadowed by his trauma. The determined journalist, bearing witness to atrocity. These narrative figures of contemporary war reportage shape, and are shaped by, broader social processes. Their significance is buried in their very self-evidence, in the way they seem to reflect rather than regulate the reality of war today.
This self-evidence, in which figuration and facticity merge, suggests how war reportage comes to moralize the reality of war for those societies within which it circulates. In fashioning a coherent war, a war capable of “representing itself”—of displaying itself in the form of the news—journalism establishes “that moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable” (White 1980, 27). The reality of war, fashioned by journalistic representation—and displaying a seamlessness and significance that can only make sense as representation—establishes that moral authority to arbitrate what war is. As the narratives of twentieth-century conflicts, particularly the Holocaust, helped define both modernity and its violence, so is war reportage, produced in the age of anti-terror “forever war” (Filkins 2008), similarly implicated in a process of definitional power broader than the journalistic texts themselves. In moralizing war’s reality, in granting war a narrative significance and interpretive shape, war reportage imposes an order reproductive of a dominant social consensus on war and of the authority that any consensus claims.
By this I do not mean to simply reassert Virilio’s (2002) argument about the “fourth front” of informational warfare and the participation of mass media in things like “shock and awe” military operations. I mean to suggest, rather, that the relationship between war and war reportage, while not simply one of reflection, is not just fabrication either. War reportage is not merely “constructed,” as many theories of popular narrative (and many dismissals of mass media) insist. Rather, war reportage is the satisfaction of a desire, a desire for war’s reality already resonant within those societies consuming news of war. And as a very prominent mediation of contemporary warfare, war reportage enacts an authority upon the wars it claims to merely reflect. This authorial-authoritative enactment entails more than representational fashioning; it entails the fulfillment of a social process. To borrow the terminology of Edward Said (1978), war reportage distributes geopolitical awareness; it elaborates and maintains a series of interests; and it is—rather than merely expresses—a will to know and, thereby, often to control.
War reportage is not, then, merely a matter of ideas (ideas about war, or suffering, or violence), but a matter of ideas constituting, perpetuating, and naturalizing the material realities of the war zone.5 The relationship between war reportage and war, I mean to argue—and, thereby, between journalism’s social processes and its symbolic products, between its factual claims and its figural resonance, between its practical limits and its epistemic power—is more dynamic, and more consequential, than terms like “construction” suggest.
1. Names of journalists and fixers have been changed to protect subject anonymity.
2. Just as war reportage employs its own chronotopes (Bakhtin 1982), its own time-space configurations for making meaning in narrative—the frontline, the battlefield, the refugee camp, the morgue, the war zone itself—so does the Classy Hotel function in this introduction as a time-space interface indicating the image of the journalist in ethnographic inquiry. As the time frame of the war with the Islamic State thickens into history, as the war takes on the flesh of description, so the war-zone hotel—among other spaces discussed in this book—becomes charged with the movement of scholarly plot. Such spaces organize my story of war because they indicate where war reportage becomes itself.
3. In this manner, ethnography readmits the experiences of war ignored by Baudrillard’s account of news and postmodernity. Baudrillard incisively captures the hyperreality of media consumption in a simulacral society. However, and as Robert Stam (1992) observes, Baudrillard fails to indicate the differences between those captivated by mass-mediated warfare and those subject to the violence so mediated.
4. Ethnography too engages in such impositions, as where an individual journalist, situated by the generic conventions of this book, fulfills the role prefigured by the arguments developed in these pages. Self-awareness concerning these discursive dynamics is one means by which to distinguish this text from those under study. Another is the distinct conceptions of truth exercised in different genres of representation. Yet another is the difference in the relations of power inherent to the transformation of particular subjects into discursive objects. An ethnographic account of war’s journalists is different, in this sense, from a journalistic account of war’s victims.
5. While I do not mean to overstate the influence of journalism, its entanglements with ascertainable sources of power—including governmental and military institutions—is apparent. That war reportage both enhances and reproduces prevailing understandings of war in the Middle East is no inert fact but a circumstance upon which power depends, to at least some degree, for its operation. On this point, I wager a distinction between the so-called CNN effect, wherein reporting on human suffering can push government and military leaders to action, and something more subtle and more diffuse: the ability of media to fix the meaning of war in relation to a “structure of dominance” (Althusser 1971). In a CNN article on Syrian war reportage, journalist Arwa Damon writes, “There were moments when I wished I could transport the decision-makers to Syria so they could bear witness to the extreme suffering and injustice. We tried to depict it, report it as best we could, as raw as we could, but it seemed not to phase [sic] them.” Here the possibilities of the “CNN effect” are confused with how dominant interests become dominant and journalism’s relation thereto. I return to this matter in Chapter 4.
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