How is popular knowledge war of shaped by the stories we consume, what are the boundaries of this knowledge, and how are these boundaries policed or contested by journalists producing knowledge from warzones? Based on years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Conflicted challenges normative conceptions of war by revealing how representational authority comes to be. Turning the lens on journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other prominent publications, Isaac Blacksin shows why news coverage of contemporary conflict, widely presumed to function as a critique of excessive violence, instead serves to sanction official rationales for war.

Blacksin argues that journalism's humanitarian frame-now hegemonic in conflict coverage-serves to de-politicize and re-moralize war, transforming war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent. Exploring the tension between experience and expression in conditions of violence, and tracking how journalists respond to dominant expectations for war's reality, Conflicted tells the story of war, reporters, and the consequences of their convergence. As new wars, and new reportage, continue to shape our understanding of armed conflict, Conflicted makes visible both the power and the particularity of war reportage now.