The present moment is defined by the visibility of war, exploding at sites that are increasingly monitored by both military and commercial entities. At a time when the Pentagon has restricted the agency of news organizations in warzones, and when amateur and quasi-professional bloggers in various geopolitical regions are destabilizing the primacy of mainstream news networks, scholars from both the humanities and the social sciences are closely evaluating the interconnections between war and media. Though media scholars such as Barbie Zelizer, Daya Thussu, and Toby Miller have crucially discussed the international television and online news coverage of the US-led War on Terror, I look closely at the nuanced cultural meaning of the conflict correspondents themselves, the increasingly beleaguered news employees who occupy the paradoxical position of both framer and framed, digital media producer and commodified cultural sign.

My dissertation examines these compelling figures, analyzing the ambivalent labor and the tricky logistics of war correspondence in the context of globalization, digitization, newsroom downsizing, and the war on terror. Drawing upon qualitative interviews, discourse analysis, archival research, and site studies, my research reveals that in order to survive, physically and professionally, war reporters must increasingly play a variety of roles: they must replace whole news bureaus that have been closed, they must blur the boundaries between above- and below-the-line labor, they must successfully wield digital technologies in competition with amateur bloggers whom they also exploit, and they must serve as a site of cultural value for the news networks even after they have been kidnapped, injured, raped, or killed.