Abstract
Shaky footage from a smartphone and first-person accounts of unfolding violence by ordinary witnesses have become intrinsic to news coverage of conflict. While the field of Journalism Studies theorizes this confluence ambivalently, recognizing its added value yet cautioning against its major pitfall – the spread of disinformation, the field’s focus on the latter occurs at the expense of the former, marginalizing if not suppressing embodied appeals to recognition in contexts of conflict. Twitter’s capacity for “real-time public, many-to-many broadcasting”, for instance, has enabled users to participate in, what Hermida calls, a global “awareness system” that helps journalists discover “issues hovering under the news radar”and, in this way, the platform has contributed to making war hyper-visible. Legacy journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of breaking, affective news and, on the other, by a techno-hermeneutic commitment to verification.
Published Version
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