Peace journalism is a genre and theory of journalism that aims to treat stories about war and conflict with balance, in contrast to war journalism, which peace journalism advocates say display a bias toward violence. The theory proposes practical methods for correcting biases in stories appearing in the mainstream and alternative media, and suggests ways for journalists to work with other media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict.
This concept was proposed by Johan Galtung.For example see the policy recommendations in the conclusion of: Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. (1965). The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2, pp. 64–91. Other terms for this broad definition of peace journalism include conflict solution journalism, conflict sensitive journalism,Howard, R. (n.d.). Conflict Sensitive Journalism in Practice. Center for Journalism Ethics: School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved October 5, 2010. constructive conflict coverage, and reporting the world.Reporting the World
War journalism is journalism about conflict that has a value bias towards violence and violent groups. This usually leads audiences to overvalue violent responses to conflict and ignore non-violent alternatives. This is understood to be the result of well documented news reporting conventions. These conventions focus only on physical effects of conflict (for example ignoring psychological impacts) and elite positions (which may or may not represent the actual parties and their goals). It is also biased toward reporting only the differences between parties, (rather than similarities, previous agreements, and progress on common issues) the here and now (ignoring causes and outcomes), and zero sums (assuming that one side's needs can only be met by the other side's compromise or defeat).Galtung, Johan, "On the role of the media in worldwide security and peace," In Tapio Varis (ed.), Peace and Communication, pp. 249–266, San Jose, Costa Rica: Universidad para La Paz.
Peace journalism aims to correct for these biases. Its operational definition is "to allow opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict".Lynch, 2008, p.147. This involves picking up calls for, and articulations of, non-violence policies from whatever quarter, and allowing them into the public sphere.
Origins
Peace journalism follows a long history of news publication, originating in non-sectarian Christian peace movements and societies of the early 19th century, which published periodicals.Roberts, Nancy L., "Peace Journalism," The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Wolfgang Donsbach (ed), Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Sectarian organizations also created publications focused on peace as part of their proselytizing in the 19th century, as did utopian communities of the period. From the 20th century, a prominent example of sectarian journalism focused on peace was Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker.Roberts, Nancy L., American peace writers, editors, and periodicals: A dictionary, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Besides being an element in the histories of pacifism and the social movement press, peace journalism is a set of journalism practices that emerged in the 1970s. Norwegian sociologist, peace researcher and practitioner Johan Galtung proposed the idea of peace journalism for journalists to follow to show how a value bias towards violence can be avoided when covering war and conflict.Seow Ting Lee & Crispin C. Maslog, "War or Peace Journalism? Asian Newspaper Coverage of Conflicts," Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): p. 311. Christian organizations such as The World Council of Churches and The World Association for Christian Communication also practice peace journalism.
Peace journalism aims to shed light on structural and cultural causes of violence, as they impact upon the lives of people in a conflict arena as part of the explanation for violence. It aims to frame conflicts as consisting of many parties and pursuing many goals rather than a simple dichotomy. An explicit aim of peace journalism is to promote peace initiatives from whatever quarter and to allow the reader to distinguish between stated positions and real goals.
Relation to war journalism Peace journalism came about through research arguing that typical conflict reporting is unethical. Research and practice in peace journalism outlines a number of reasons for the existence and dominance of war journalism in conflict news.
Vested interests of war journalism Firstly, the notion that media elites always act to preserve their favored status quo, and their own commercial and political interests, is given relatively little weight. Shared characteristics of the socio-economic class, which heavily influences the production of journalism, are important. For example, their shared ideological pressures, perceptions, attitudes, and values form the basis of a "dominant reading" of facts that are selected to appear in news. These can then act to fix and naturalize meaning and hide the actual creation of meaning.Lynch, J. & McGoldrick, A. (2005). Peace Journalism. Gloucestershire: Hawthorn Press, p.197 & p.211; also see McGoldrick, 2008, p.95.
However, even in the presence of powerful elite media interests against war, war journalism often dominates conflict discourse. Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick show examples from Britain, Ireland, Georgia, and Iraq, where war journalism dominated coverage despite key influential media interests against war.Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, pp.198–199.
Journalistic objectivity
Therefore, not only political and economic, but also social and cultural factors have contributed to the dominance of war journalism in conflict reporting. With the growth of mass media, especially from the 19th century, news advertising became the most important source of media revenue.
Whole audiences needed to be engaged across communities and regions to maximize advertising revenue. This led to "Journalistic objectivity as an industry standard ... a set of conventions allowing the news to be presented as all things to all people".Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, p.203 And in modern journalism, especially with the emergence of 24 hour news cycles, speed is of the essence in responding to breaking stories. It is not possible for reporters to decide "from first principals" every time how they will report each and every story that presents itself.Lynch, J. (2008). Debates in Peace Journalism. Sydney: Sydney University Press, p.7 It follows that convention governs much of journalism.
The rise of journalistic objectivity was part of a larger movement within western academia towards empirical "just report the facts" epistemology and research. By the 1980s it was focused on the philosophical ideal of objectivity.Mindich, 2000, p.13 Mindich argues that journalistic objectivity should be distinguished from scientific objectivity. For example, the experimental sciences use: Inter-laboratory replication; Random assignment of subjects to conditions; Efforts to ensure that human subjects and experimenters are ignorant of the expectations (hypotheses) of the research: to avoid the observer-expectancy effect The subject-expectancy effect; Anonymous peer review, a form of peer review, to promote open and systematic exploration of meaning without subjective, political bias; Careful analysis to ensure that research subjects are adequately representative of the general population, that is not overly atypical when compared to the average population.
While it is arguable whether these experimental science safe guards provide true objectivity, in the absence of these safeguards, journalism around conflict relies on three conventions to maintain its own form of objectivity (also see journalistic objectivity), and is therefore distinct from scientific objectivity.
War journalism conventions Firstly, to sell audiences to advertisers, reporting must appeal to as broad an audience as possible and therefore focuses on facts that are the least controversial. Conflict processes are often controversial, so coverage of them risks alienating potential consumers, who may be sensitive to the exposure of structural or cultural predisposing factors.Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, p. 210.
Secondly, a bias in favor of official sources means that, while it may appear uncontroversial, as there is only one official representative for the government on any given issueLynch, J. & McGoldrick, A. (2009). Day four, Sunday August 30. Lecture presented in the Conflict Resolving Media course, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of Sydney. and since only the official government is usually allowed to wield legal, sanctioned force within its territoryMax Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed./trans./intro. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946, p.78. coverage will tend to privilege violent responses to conflict over non-violent, social-psychological, context-informed responses.Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, p. 209.
Journalists Annabel McGoldrick and Jake Lynch argue that non-critical reporting of official sources is often rewarded by those sources. Through "information transactions", these same official sources allow uncritical journalists privileged access to information in the future.Lynch and McGoldrick, 2009.
Thirdly and lastly, 'dualism' biases journalistic objectivity towards violence: "A decision to tell a story in that [bipolar] way can slip past, unnoticed, without drawing attention to itself because of its close resemblance, in shape and structure, to so much of the story-telling we already take for granted".Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, p. 210.
Gatekeeping in war journalism These conventions also form "gates" by which gatekeepers in journalism include or exclude various aspects of reality in final publication.Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2008). Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework for Exploring Information Control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, 1493–1512; White, D. (1950). The "gate keeper:" A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–390.
In this way, proponents of peace journalism argue that in the media meaning occurs according to: "a set of rules and relations established before the reality or the experience under discussion actually occurred".Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005, p. 213. In war journalism the objectivity conventions serve this purpose, but are shadowy and unacknowledged.Lynch, 2008, p. 6 Gatekeeping is therefore likely to be secretive and haphazard. It may distort, and also fix, meaning in conflict coverage and obfuscate the production of meaning.Hall, S. (1997). Representation and the media. (Transcript). Media Education Foundation. Northampton: United States. Retrieved July 23, 2007.
Peace journalism evaluative criteria might be applied to show how conventional conflict reporting is biased in favor of violence and violent groups. An example is the coverage leading up to the September 2009 meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and US President Barack Obama.