Practicing Media—Mediating Practice | Reporting, Uncertainty, and the Orchestrated Fog of War: A Practice-Based Lens for Understanding Global Media Events

Abstract

Media coverage of the ongoing multistate conflict in Syria, extending into Iraq, has been punctuated by the marshaling of conditions for exceptional global media event coverage by states, citizens, and newsmakers alike. Where conditions for reporting are already limited because of ongoing conflict, both international agency coverage and governmental sources represent crucial conduits for dissemination of information worldwide. This research develops a practice-based lens to examine the embodied, geographic, and temporal networks of media production practices through a multilingual database comparison of French, Russian, American, and British newswire coverage of major military campaigns. Mapping shifts between on-the-ground reporting and dislocated geopolitical coverage against the temporal unfolding of event coverage reveals a new typology: the premediated media event.