Ulla Skovsbøl Knudsen

Telling Stories of War: Narrative Aspects of the Norwegian Journalist Åsne Seierstad's Coverage of the Invasion of Iraq Ulla Skovsbøl Knudsen

The narrative journalism that borrows its tools from literature is nothing but a slippery slope leading to the decay of the journalistic trade and undermines the reputation of serious and objective journalism. So reads the critiques by many news journalists who deny the narrative style a place in news reporting. This book claims, on the contrary, that narrative journalism can be both a more efficient and a more compelling way of communicating facts, and that it even has the potential of opening-up a qualitatively different perception and understanding of the content it communicates. Telling Stories of War offers a review of literature on narrative journalism and develops a method to identify and analyse narrative elements in journalistic texts. The method is applied on a selection of articles on the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the famous Norwegian journalist and author Åsne Seierstad ? both admired and criticised internationally for her narrative reporting from war zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.