ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates metacoverage as another prevailing strategy applied by the mainstream news media when following up on eyewitness images and other online visual sources provided by non-traditional media actors. Metacoverage has mostly been understood as a response to the professionalized communication environment along with the intensified and increasingly fragmented flow of information. In the case of conflict reporting, metacoverage stands as an umbrella term for various stories about the infrastructure of communication and the conditions for accessing and assessing information from areas of conflict (see also Mortensen 2012b). Some metacoverage is concerned with military and political strategic communication and news management, including public relations, public diplomacy, propaganda, and censorship. Other metacoverage stories are preoccupied with the transformed media landscape in which journalists have to maneuver because of the rise of social media and networked journalism. Moreover, metacoverage deals self-referentially with the news media’s role in warfare by centering on framing and agenda setting as well as audience responses—for example, emotional reactions to war pictures and reports (Esser 2009, 712–713). The stories-on-the-stories and the stories-behind-the-stories also focus on ongoing struggles between different actors concerning the availability, interpretation, and mobilization of various pieces of information. Lastly, media practitioners are brought to the fore—for instance, in the propensity to turn the conflict correspondent into the celebritized subject of the story (Cottle 2006, 94) or in accounts of the political and personal motives driving whistleblowers, activists, and other media actors.
