There is a woeful silence in global media as well as a widespread reluctance in the fields of media and communication studies to fully recognize and research the systemic and interlocking nature of deepening existential threats that together now constitute today's 'world-in-crisis'. It is time to move beyond disaggregated news reporting and research parochialisms and grapple conceptually and theoretically as well as empirically and politically with the complexity of the planetary emergency and its communication. This article elaborates on these claims and provides conceptual and theoretical coordinates of use in re-imagining mainstream journalism's potential for processes of transition and transformation.

The chapter argues that now is the time to recognise how processes of peace and the waging of conflicts are not only enmeshed in global relationships and power dynamics but also within the multiple global crises generated by late-modern, globalised world society. Global crises are often seen and reported as "isolated" or "one-off" events, but should rather be approached as endemic outcomes of a globalised world-in-crisis. The global crisis of Covid-19 illustrates the need to approach today's global crises as endemic to, enmeshed within and potentially encompassing of today's world-in-crisis. Covid-19 is both expressive of but also exacerbating today's compounding global crises. The chapter asks for a journalism that sees and communicates "the true extent of the combined existential threats that confront not only world society but the conditions for life itself on planet earth".

This chapter follows on from Chapter 6 in forefronting the views, accounts and experiences of our representative sample of journalists, and moving beyond the previous discussion of motivations, demographics and different responses to risk-reporting, whether in respect of age, gender, medium, or staffers and freelancers, nationally based or internationally peripatetic journalists. Here, we consider the processes directly involved in dangerous assignments and how these variously impact journalists' decision-making and their professional practices. Sometimes these deliberately strive to keep them safer but sometimes they can also inadvertently contribute to heightened exposure to risks.KeywordsHostile EnvironmentSafety TrainingBody ArmourSunday TimeNews OrganisationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Today a number of global trends and endemic conflicts position journalists in harm's way. This includes, as we have heard across preceding chapters, when reporting on repressive and warring states, criminal gangs and warlords, venal corporations and transnational terrorists — all of whom can violently disregard human rights and deliberately waste human lives. Though globally enmeshed conflicts and crises are not confined to the sharp-end of killing characterised in the new Western way of war, the particularly brutal forms of ethnic and gender-based violence associated with new wars, or new forms of mediatised transnational terror, our preceding discussion in Chapter 4 has served to highlight how global trends increasingly position not only civilians and non-combatants at risk, but also journalists.KeywordsCivil SocietyPublic SphereInternational Criminal CourtCultural SociologyHuman CircleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Across the preceding chapters we have sought to highlight and then contextualise in historical and global contexts the dangers and risks now being experienced by journalists when going about their professional practice of reporting news in and from some of the most dangerous places in the world. We have also provided hard empirical evidence about these increased dangers, and the various patterns and trends that characterise them. This chapter and the next deliberately seek to go behind some of these statistical trends and give prominence to the voices, views and experiences of the journalists themselves, in their own words. Through these first-hand testimonies and accounts, often recounted at length, we learn of the dangers and risks that now confront journalists, and how they seek to keep themselves safe.