Though her death is making headlines across the world, only a few Pakistani news sources have reported it so far. I’m not surprised… Colvin was an American journalist working for The Sunday Times. While I’m aware of the common anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, I do believe that the various US-led military operations are not what most Americans want. Vietnam War is said to have changed the realm of conflict reporting as the journalists were provided unlimited access to the war zones during this time. Reports of these correspondents showing horrific realities of the battlefield dramatically changed the opinions of US citizens who later voted against the continuation of US operation. What triggered this change was the human cost revealed through the coverage of death and suffering during wars.

Colvin pursued what the British war reporter Martin Bell called the ‘journalism of attachment,’ which is not just about knowing but also about caring. It broadens the scope of reporting beyond a mere objective position, if there is any objective position in journalism that is. Pain is a subjective reality and communicating the scenes of suffering challenge the notions that legitimize war. It does not advocate whether a conflict is right or wrong, but communicates the fact that if it has the potential to cause bereavement to the innocent, it must stop.

Syria is not being invaded by a foreign state. What then justified Colvin’s presence in Homs till the very end was her self-proclaimed war against human suffering in conflict zones, articulating the idea that there is more to the world than ‘us’ against ‘them’. I don’t care Colvin was an American. What matters to me is the fact that we both support journalism of attachment in which humanity comes before nationality, a kind of reporting that has to be acknowledged despite the increasingly negative sentiments around media and journalism today.

Originally published in The Express Tribune

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/10359/marie-colvins-journalism-of-attachment/

Martin has a circulatory disease that affects his ability to walk and he had sued the PGA tour for the ability to use a golf cart to get from tee to green. There is no question that Casey Martin make the golf shots, but what the court has said is that riding in the cart does not fundamentally alter the game of golf, the essence of which, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, is still shot-making.

To explain what went on here, Sandel brings in Aristotle who argued that to understand the moral nature of a given practice we need to understand its purpose. Thus to decide how to distribute a set of flutes amongst a population we must first know what flutes are for. Aristotle’s solution was as follows. Because flutes are made to create beautiful music, the best flutes should go to the most accomplished flute players.

Yet not all cases are as straightforward, says Sandel. In the golfing dispute, the jurors had to first establish the purpose of the game of golf, and then whether moving about the golf course in a cart would give Martin an unfair advantage over his rivals. They came to the conclusion that the essence of golf is to put a ball in a small hole and that reaching the ball on wheels did not alter the game in any fundamental way. However, this is not how the PGA or the professional players see the practice of golf. In the wider societal context of athletics and sports, argues Sandel, golfers have to contend with the commonly held perception of golf as a game that does not require physical fitness or sporting prowess. The ruling in favour of Martin undermined their sustained efforts to portray golf as an athletic endeavour. It diminished, in other words, the societal standing of their practice.

From a practice-theoretical perspective, I find this case fascinating. Until now I have been mostly concerned with the rewards of practice (Warde 2005), particularly of media-related practices, but this lecture raises new questions for me that I will have to address elsewhere. For one thing, it sends me to a passage in Boellstorff’s (2008) monograph Coming of Age in Second Life in which he discusses how ‘residents’ of the virtual world Second Life (SL) who are disabled in their first lives find that they can do things in SL that they are unable to do offline. Thus there has been organised resistance in SL to introduce voice technology as many residents, including those with certain disabilities, felt it would radically alter the nature of their SL sociality.

References

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Warde, A. (2005) `Consumption and Theories of Practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture 5(2),  pp. 131-54.

I don’t think this ad would work on television for reasons outlined by the panel (large portions of the general public would not be educated enough to get the real meaning, others may be too shocked by the first comments to make it to the real point) but to be honest I’m disappointed they didn’t show the ad and the discussion on their show. It’s controversial, but it’s worth watching, it’s worth thinking about. Maybe putting it on the website is just a form of underground promotion for the show? What do you think?