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Journalism that gives peace a chance

REVIEW FOR JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNIUCATION QUARTERLY 

Bill Kovarik, Ph.D. 

Prof. of Communication

Radford University

Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, Peace Journalism, (Gloustershire, UK: Hawthorn Press, 2005). 

Gadi Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).  

War and conflict have been so intrinsically linked to journalism that even definitions of news often begin with the term  “conflict.”  However, journalists don’t just observe conflict passively; they can have an important influence over the way conflicts begin and end. Therefore, it is important that journalists spend more time understanding the peace process and the role of the media if they are to fulfill an ethical responsibility to do no harm. This is the initial argument advanced in two new books on peace and the news media.  

Peace Journalism, by veteran British journalists Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, is the culmination of many years of professional work and media training, especially in the Balkans. 

The book is intended as a text for journalism classes or professional training settings.  It is an impressive mix of insights, exercises and practical examples encouraging journalists to avoid conflict orientation or “war journalism”. There are also discussion questions and an set of web links to about 40 international media groups working towards conflict resolution.

Peace Journalism attempts to sensitize reporters to aggressive and inflammatory rhetoric and at the same time to model better methods news reporting. These methods are seen as true to traditions of objectivity and balance and yet helping orient the overall media climate towards the goal of peace.

One of the first exercises in the book is a comparison between two sample television scripts with storyboards. The subject is a Hamas terror bombing. The first script, taken from an actual news program, will sound familiar. It uses sensationalistic rhetoric depicting a suicide bomber “sent out to kill.” It describes pressure on Israeli authorities to slow the peace process. It then questions whether the Palestinian Authority is strong enough to crack down on militant groups. 

The alternative television script, while providing the same facts, approaches the narrative with the idea that Palestinians are dreading renewed military action and that both Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of violence. It shows other aspects of the conflict  besides violence, for example, an interview with a Palestinian doctor.  It ends on this note:  “Many here are calling for a renewed urgency in the political process as the only way to remove the causes of violence.”  While the second script would be acceptable in many nations, the first script could only have been shown by the media on one side of the issue. 

Thus, where conflict-oriented journalism all too frequently presents violence as its own cause, part of a ‘tit-for-tat’ series of exchanges,  the idea behind peace journalism according to Lynch and McGoldrick is to present facts but also look for underlying causes of violence and a variety of perspectives from many sides of the conflict.

         Journalists can avoid harm, the authors argue, if they: 

         • Avoid portraying conflicts as being made up of only two parties, but instead look for the many smaller groups. 

         • Avoid treating a conflict as if it is only going on in the place and time, and to try to trace the links and consequences for people in other places and in the future.        

         • Ask questions that may reveal common ground;

         • Avoid blame; rather, look at how shared problems and issues are leading to consequences that all parties say they never intended. 

         • Don’t focus on the suffering of only one group and avoid victimizing language. Don’t use words like pathetic, devastated, defenseless, or tragedy. Instead, report on what has been done by the people. Ask how they are coping. Ask whether they can suggest solutions.

         These suggestions, and indeed most of the book itself, come from experience and are significant contributions to the professional craft.  The book is not perfect. Theoreticians will be somewhat concerned with a comparison between journalistic objectivity and  Newtonian mechanics in which is described as a linear model (from actor through media to audience). Space prohibits a full discussion of this idea, but the authors  see a corresponding paradigm shift in systems theory as the basis for non-linear approaches and feedback loops. A more complete analogy, on the other hand, would posit “Newtonian” journalism as producing accurate effects under normal conditions and “quantum” journalism as necessary for accuracy under high velocity (eg. conflict) conditions. Thus the analogy does not hold up. Despite this, the authors deserve credit for a good general survey of communications theory that helps place peace journalism in context.

Working journalists and journalism educators will be deeply grateful for Lynch and McGoldrick’s work. The script and story comparisons, the workshop approach, and the background on recent issues in conflict resolution in Peace Journalism combine to make it a model of usefulness in any topic area. It is one of the most significant new books on the profession of journalism to have been published in many years. 

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Gadi Wolfsfeld’s Media and the Path to Peace is a study of three major peace conferences from the 1990s: the Oslo peace process  (between Israel and Palestine);  the Good Friday accords (between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland); and a third set of negotiations between Israel and Jordon. 

 Wolfsfeld,  Associate Professor of Political Science and Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,  provides a detailed study of the relationship between the news media, government peace negotiators, and public opinion.  Wolfsfeld’s research methods involved interviews with participants in both media and negotiation roles as well as content analysis of news articles.

Wolfsfeld began research with questions about whether changes in media performance could impact the political environment of a peace negotiation. He defines varieties of news media influence on peace process:  defining the political atmosphere or the debate;   influencing the strategy and behavior of political actors; and raising and lowering public standing and legitimacy of the various antagonists. 

         In terms of atmosphere, the contrast between Israel and Ireland is especially instructive.  Sensationalism on the part of the Israeli media was a major problem in the run-up to the Oslo peace negotiations, he notes. Even Israeli Prime Minisiter Yitzhak Rabin asked his country’s journalists to temper their sensationalism, recalling the more measured reporting of similar bombings and events in previous decades. However, most  Israeli journalists did not feel an ethical need to curb sensationalism. In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, many journalists felt an ethical obligation to avoid the effects of  sensationalized violence on the peace process

The media had a strong influence on the course of the debate, Wolfsfeld finds.  In Israel, the ‘lessons’ always seemed obvious:  “Incitement was the major cause of the Rabin assassination…[and]  the Palestinians were completely to blame for the failure at Camp David.” Although dissent to these ‘story lines’ was present, Wolfsfeld says, they were impossible to hear over the roar of the crowd. “Hamas was extremely successful at using terrorism to derail the Oslo peace process, and the hysteria of the Israeli news media was an important element in this dynamic,” he finds.

On the other hand, peace advocates received the majority of coverage in Northern Ireland, and forces opposed to the Good Friday accords felt that they had been shortchanged by the media, which tended to emphasize the prospects for peace and downplay opposition to the accords, Wolfsfeld finds. 

         The more influence the media had on peace negotiators, the more they insulated themselves with public relations professionals to  regulate the flow of information and perform damage control.  Leaks about possible concessions for example were damaging because they were politically unpopular when sensationalized and not explained in context.  One recommendation to counter these trends is for reporters to share duties among the media of antagonistic countries. 

Wolfsfeld’s study is insightful but it is not intended to be comprehensive or balanced; for example, there is far more focus on the Israeli media than on the Palestinian or Jordanian media. Nor does the book succeed, even in terms of its literature review, in fulfilling expectations that might be created by the breadth of topic implied in the title. As communications research, it is a valuable addition to scholarship on the role of media in the peace processes.   

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Overall, research and new professional insights into the problems of conflict journalism are long overdue. These two books provide a contrast with the hundreds of memoirs and profiles of traditional combat journalists now in print. A recurring theme in these hundreds of combat memoirs is the enormous sense of the futility and horror of war. Combat reporters wish there was something they could do to prevent it, and indeed, argue with some authority that accurately depicting the horror is itself a service. However, few offer insights into how war can be averted.  

It can hardly be argued that peace journalism is entirely novel. If there is any sin of omission in these two books, one would be a lack of historical grounding.  The current lore and history of journalism so elevates the position of the war correspondent that it seems an inevitable step on the path to a successful mainstream media career. 

Yet there have been many occasions when editorial policies aimed at conflict resolution have played a constructive role at vital moments in history.  We might reflect that the journalists who covered Mahatma Ghandi in the 1930s, such as William L. Shirer, knew that perfectly well that they were focusing the media agenda on non-violence. Atlanta Journal editor Ralph McGill would have rejected the label  “peace journalist” in the 1960s, but he probably did more than anyone to keep the American South as peaceful as possible during the Civil Rights movement.

Similarly, many journalists and journalism educators today might not feel comfortable with the label “peace journalist,” but most will recognize, in the suggestions found in these two books, a reflection of their own concerns, and they will value the ideas that can help give peace a chance.     

 

Links:

Peace Journalism -- MediaChannel.org

Journalism and Peace Venues by Txema Ramirez de la Piscina

Center for War, Peace and the News Media New York University

Poynter Online -- Bibliography on war correspondents

In researching this article I was interested to learn that "peace journalism" started in the 1970s with some UK activists. I find this idea intriguing. What linguistic prejudice has us considering "war correspondents"as mainstream but "peace journalists" as marginal? Even so, its hard to imagine any real "war correspondent" not having a very definite preference for peace.