Risky Assignments

Abstract

This article analyzes the post-feminist, neo-liberal construction of “risk” and “security” in a recent set of post-9/11 training manuals for non-embedded journalists who prepare to work in what security texts call “hostile environments.” It investigates the ways these training documents translate ideas about risk and reporting, through the language of choice, into sexed and gendered prescriptive cues about securing professional comportment in the field. While the documents present the potential risks of hostile environments in terms of a kind of “sexual equity of risk,” this article argues that security training texts re-sex journalism through photographs and diagrams which put the man back into the war zone.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jonathan Sterne and Carol Stabile for their astute comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, Andrea Braithwaite and Anna Feigenbaum for their research assistance in its preparation, and editors Lisa McLaughlin and Cynthia Carter and two anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions in the review process. This research was made possible by funding received from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and a research start-up grant from McGill University. SSHRC provided funding for copyright clearance fees for the use of some of the images in this article.

Notes

1. These texts also appear to have taken into account the fact that, since the 1970s, women constitute a steady 20 percent of the corps of war correspondents, and that women are also more likely than men to, in the language of post-feminism and neo-liberalism, “choose” to leave the profession, or seek re-assignment from the war zone, for familial reasons (see Hess 1996; see also Chambers, Steiner & Fleming 2004).

2. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is a non-profit organization for journalists formed by a group of US foreign correspondents in 1981 in order to document and publicize assaults on press freedom internationally. The CPJ also lobbies for the creation and enforcement of legislation to protect press freedom rights. Reporters without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) are two other organizations for journalists committed to the protection of press freedom worldwide that also produce security manuals for correspondents. The IFJ is the world's largest federation of journalists. It represents approximately 500,000 members and promotes independent trade unions for journalists (see their website http://www.ifj.org).

3. They are “unilaterals” in US military jargon; embeds go through military-provided two-week boot camp courses in preparation for their placement in a military unit.