We argue that one needs to reconceptualize the safety of journalists within these three intertwined dimensions. Third, the tactics used by journalists decrease public faith in the media and the media can no longer play a watchdog role. Second, in order to remain safe, journalists undertake various tactics including compromising the objectivity of news in a regime where security apparatus and pro-government journalists work in tandem to surveil and intimidate non-partisan journalists. First, journalists’ safety incorporates avoiding bodily harm (imprisonment, enforced disappearance, and so forth), and harassment, as well as economic and career threats. On the basis of in-depth interviews of 23 Bangladeshi journalists, we argue that the concept of journalists’ safety has three intertwined dimensions. In the Bangladeshi case we argue that the parameters for evaluating what constitutes safety for journalists go beyond conventional wisdom. Commonly, these are considered in terms of harassment and bodily harms such as incarceration and murder of journalists. Journalists are currently facing a multitude of threats. Despite the criticism leveled at journalism fields in the global north over their perceived silencing of African voices, African journalists are similarly engaged in this silencing as well. Specifically, it finds that African journalists are –counterintuitively - vital players in silencing some African voices in their construction of knowledge about the atrocities in Darfur. This paper shows that African suffering was made legible for African audiences through a combination of American, English, and Sudanese voices. This silence is even more perplexing, considering that scholars and observers have been critical of who is quoted as a source when the global north covers events unfolding in Africa. Thus, while scholarship has begun taking Africa's coverage of itself seriously, there has been a slower uptick in focusing on whom African journalists give voice to as co-constructors of events. This despite scholarship on sources being vital to our understanding of how journalists gain the “raw materials” to produce stories about events. Perceived ‘obligations to report’ and discomfort over whether or not to help individuals in certain cases are, I argue, examples of journalists’ double-interpellation as both spectators and witnesses to the suffering of others.Īlthough the last two decades have seen a concerted effort to understand the role and place of African journalism in covering events on the continent, there has been little focus on who journalists chose to quote as sources in their stories. Finally, I argue that normative tensions experienced by journalists as moral conflicts suggest that this journalism operates within a humanitarian imaginary of the type described by Lilie Chouliaraki. I suggest that the case of journalists in South Sudan raises a number of important questions for research into affect/emotion in practices of news production more generally. I make the case that emotion is not simply ‘picked up’ in the course of tiring and stressful work, but is an important part of how practices of journalism in South Sudan successfully proceed. In the second, I argue for the importance of affect/emotion as an integral part of the practice of journalism in conflict. ![]() I also provide an account of media intimidation in South Sudan as it appears to journalists, and some of the tactics adopted to cope with this. It can afford journalists epistemic authority, material benefits and recognition as ‘professional’. In the first, I argue that risk functions as both a constraint to the practices of journalistsworking in South Sudan, as well as an element of the practice itself. To these questions, this thesis develops three arguments. This thesis addresses two research questions, asking howjournalists’ practices are enabled and constrained in the context of South Sudan, and what normative tensions arise during their practices of journalism. This thesis explores the practices and normative tensions of journalists reporting on conflict in South Sudan, based on a combination of semi-structured interviews with journalists based in Nairobi, Kampala and Juba, as well as ethnographic observation of an investigative reporting trip to the Malakal protection of civilians site in Upper Nile state.
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