Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond

Abstract

In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

“…This lens can be generatively applied to local-foreign news work. Scholarly inquiry attentive to race and gender is adept at demonstrating not only how a particular subject position is permeated by hybridity and transformation but, as well, how such a position might cultivate its own forms of knowledge-making, forms able to contest or bypass more dominant orders (Al-Ghazzi, 2021; Blacksin, 2022; Mitra et al, 2021). At the same time, gendered and racial identities can delimit the type of news that fixers and other local-foreign news workers are tasked to produce (Palmer and Melki, 2018; Mitra et al, 2022).…”