The research goes beyond current conflict reporting research and enriches research on emotions in journalism. It shows that to understand current conflict reporting ecosystems, we need to unlearn the dichotomies present in (war) journalism research: reporters and fixers, foreign and local, objectivity and subjectivity, emotionality and rationality, precarity and power, and even journalism and activism. The outcomes are organized around the following argumentation line:
1. Research on conflict reporting needs more postcolonial thinking: more complexity and nuance. We also need to take seriously media professionals' emotional labour and the many risks to mental well-being faced by all media professionals covering war zones.
2. The collaboration among media professionals covering wars and conflicts is characterized by a perceived 'emotional gap' between 'locals' and 'foreign' reporters. This project shows that the different levels of closeness within the transnational teams are valued because they can lead to complex, higher-quality, ethical journalism. Local producers and fixers provide their contextual expertise, in-depth knowledge of the war and its history, and empathy with sources; foreign reporters provide perspective and transnational experience.
3. The affective proximity, usually associated with media professionals of local origin, is often a source of mistrust. Many local media professionals in war and conflict areas do not feel trusted by their foreign colleagues just because they are local, and, therefore, supposedly too emotional and biased. The research argues that this fear of bias is a case of epistemic injustice: a situation when someone suffers a credibility deficit based on skin color, gender, or origin. The research challenges the epistemic injustice by investigating how local media professionals living in Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine perform emotional labour. These media professionals manage their affective proximity and have thought-through strategies on how to compartmentalize their affects, opinions, and behaviour. As a result, their emotional engagement does not necessarily lead to bias and rather works as a form of embodied knowledge.
4. The project further explores how emotions become a part of journalists’ knowledge production by conceptualizing affective epistemology in journalism. The project identifies four epistemic affordances of emotions in (war) journalism. We also show that current conflict reporting forms alliances with discourses on human rights and justice and with legal fact-finding institutions, thus challenging the boundary between journalism and activism. The professional norms of neutrality, balance, and distance are being replaced by new standards in fact-finding, verification, and open endorsement of democratic values.
5. Mainstream war journalism can also learn from freelance reporters from relatively small, non-Anglophone media markets. These reporters, who find themselves in the middle of the conflict-reporting hierarchy of precarity, remain neglected by academic research.
Based on these nuances, challenging the typical hierarchies in war reporting, the project also provides guidelines for ethical and sustainable collaboration among reporters, fixers, and local producers covering war zones.
