“Blurring the main story”: news in the work of Ciaran Carson

This article explores Ciaran Carson’s engagement with print and television news media. While critics have emphasised the news’s importance to Breaking News (2003), this article argues that the collection extends the journalistic concerns of Carson’s earlier work. By analysing coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict and drawing on the Carson archives at Emory, University, Atlanta, it shows that Carson’s responses to the news remain interested in the “blurring” of different reports, images, and narratives. In critiquing “objectivity” as a journalistic value, Carson’s work explores the tendency of news stories to shift and change, suggesting that no account can offer more than “the half of it.” Alongside this, the article explores how Carson’s senses of place and event respond to media saturation. Life in Belfast during the Troubles, his work realises, is often itself a “blur” of different stories, with even the most ordinary experiences coloured by the consumption of news.