This paper extends my previous research on vertical mediation and offers a critical analysis of international news media coverage of the current war in Yemen (2014-present), focusing on air and missile strikes on civilian sites, including an airport in Aden, prison in Sadaa, and telecom facility in Hodeidah. News media coverage of such attacks is not only reductive and polarizing but often confuses or effaces particularities of the conflict, whether parties involved, sites destroyed, or people killed. At the same time, these reports have become a kind of raw material for making sense of this war, including by forensic media organizations. I argue there is a need for other ways of imagining and critiquing the material relations of aerial/ballistic technologies, urban space, media, and geopolitics. Political analysts have described Yemen as a “security vacuum,” but I am also interested in the ways news media position the country as a kind of entropic state – one composed of warring parties that not only attack one another, but their own infrastructures and civilians, without pointing to the integral role of US/European weapons systems, financing, and refueling in this process.

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