ON THIS SECTION:

1- What is Peace Journalism?

2- Peace Journalism for Journalists

3- Principles and Guidelines for TMS Writers

4- Remarks

By Jake Lynch

Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices – about what to report, and how to report it – that create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.

If readers and audiences are furnished with such opportunities, but still decide they prefer war to peace, there is nothing more journalism can do about it, while remaining journalism. On the other hand, there is no matching commitment to ensuring a fair hearing for violent responses, if only because they seldom struggle for a place on the news agenda.

How come? To report is to choose. ‘We just report the facts’, journalists say, but ‘the facts’ is a category of practically infinite size. Even in these days of media profusion, that category has to be shrunk to fit into the news. The journalist is a ‘gatekeeper’, allowing some aspects of reality through, to emerge, blinking, into the public eye; and keeping the rest in the dark.

Neither is this a random process. The bits left out are always, or usually, the same bits, or the same sorts of bits. News generally prefers official sources to anyone from the ‘grassroots’; event to process; and a two-sided battle for supremacy as the basic conflict model.

These preferences, or biases, hardened into industry conventions as journalism began to be sold as a mass-produced commodity in consumer societies, and faced pressure to present itself as all-things-to-all-people, capable of being marketed to potential readers, listeners and viewers of all political views and none.

Quoting officials – a category topped by the political leader of one’s own country – is a choice and a preference, but one with a built-in alibi. It was not our ‘fault’ that this person became head of government: s/he just ‘is’. ‘Indexing’, or the familiar journalistic habit of restricting the extent of debate to differences between government and official opposition – ‘elite discord’ – has the same effect, of camouflaging choices as facts.

What about event and process? News that dwells on, say, the details of death and destruction wrought by a bomb, avoids controversy. The device has, indisputably, gone off. There are well-attested casualty figures, from trustworthy sources such as hospitals and the police. What is automatically more controversial is to probe why the bombers did it, what was the process leading up to it, what were their grievances and motivations.

As to dualism, well, when I was a reporter at the BBC, we all realised that a successful career could be based on the following formula: ‘on the one hand… on the other hand… in the end, only time will tell’. To have ‘balance’, to ‘hear both sides’, is a reliable way to insulate oneself against complaints of one-sidedness, or bias.

War Journalism and Its Antidote

There are deep-seated reasons, then, why these are the dominant conventions in journalism, but, taken together, they mean that its framing of public debates over conflict issues is generally on the side of violent responses. It merits the description, ‘war journalism’.

How come? Take the dualism first. If you start to think about a conflict as a tug-of-war between two great adversaries, then any change in their relationship – any movement – can only take place along a single axis. Just as, in tug-of-war, one side gaining a metre means the other side losing a metre, so any new development, in a conflict thus conceived, immediately begs to be assessed in a zero-sum game. Anything that is not, unequivocally, winning, risks being reported as losing. It brings a readymade incentive to step up efforts for victory, or escalate. People involved in conflict ‘talk tough’ – and often ‘act tough’ – as they play to a gallery the media have created.

Remove acts of political violence from context and you leave only further violence as a possible response. This is why there is so little news about peace initiatives – if no underlying causes are visible, there is nothing to ‘fix’. Only in this form of reporting does it make any sense to view ‘terrorism’, for example, as something on which it is possible or sensible to wage ‘war’.

And if you wait, to report on either underlying causes or peace initiatives, until it suits political leaders to discuss or engage with them, you might wait a long time. Stirrings of peace almost invariably begin at lower levels. There is, furthermore, a lever in the hands of governments that no one else has – the ‘legitimate’ use of military force. For all these reasons, the primacy of official sources, coupled with the enduring national orientation of most media, is bound to skew the representation of conflicts in favour of a pronounced receptiveness to the advocacy of violence.

Hence, peace journalism, as a remedial strategy and an attempt to supplement the news conventions to give peace a chance.

Peace journalism:

·    Explores the backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation, presenting causes and options on every side (not just ‘both sides’);

·    Gives voice to the views of all rival parties, from all levels;

·    Offers creative ideas for conflict resolution, development, peacemaking and peacekeeping;

·    Exposes lies, cover-up attempts and culprits on all sides, and reveals excesses committed by, and suffering inflicted on, peoples of all parties;

·    Pays attention to peace stories and post-war developments.

Reality and Representation

Peace journalism is more realistic, in the sense of fidelity to a reality that already exists, independently of our knowledge or representation of it. To report violence without background or context is to misrepresent it, since any conflict is, at root, a relationship, of parties setting and pursuing incompatible goals. To omit any discussion of them is a distortion.

At the same time, it acknowledges that there is no one correct version of this reality that everyone will agree upon. We understand the world around us by taking messages and images – including those served up by the news – and slotting them into codes we develop through our lives and carry in our heads. Meaning is not created solely at the point of production, or encoding; no act of representation is complete until it has been received, or decoded. Decoding is something we often do automatically, since so much of what we read, hear and see is familiar. This is what propaganda relies on – establish Saddam Hussein as a ‘bad man’, or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a ‘threat’, and it forms a prism, through which all the reality, both subsequent and previous, tends to be viewed.

Journalism is often easy prey for such efforts because it does not generally encourage us to reflect on the choices it is making, for reasons discussed above. The famous US ‘anchor-man’, Walter Cronkite, signed off CBS Evening News every night with the catchphrase, “that’s the way it is”. How it came to be that way would be an interesting conversation, but it is not one in which news is generally keen to engage.

Communications students will recognise the last few paragraphs as a potted version of reception theory. In writing this introduction, I’ve resisted academic sources, because, yes folks, the clichés are true, media scholars often do dress in black (which we won’t hold against them) and chew polysyllables for breakfast (which we might). However it’s worth quoting one famous aphorism coined by a clever and original researcher, Gaye Tuchman: “the acceptance of representational conventions as facticity makes reality vulnerable to manipulation”.

So peace journalism is in favour of truth, as any must be. Of course reporters should report, as truthfully as they can, the facts they encounter; only ask, as well, how they have come to meet these particular facts, and how the facts have come to meet them. If it’s always the same facts, or the same sorts of facts, adopt a policy of seeking out important stories, and important bits of stories, which would otherwise slip out of the news, and devise ways to put them back in. And try to let the rest of us in on the process. Peace journalism is that which abounds in cues and clues to prompt and equip us to ‘negotiate’ our own readings, to open up multiple meanings, to inspect propaganda and other self-serving representations on the outside.

Can journalists actually do this, and do they? Latterly, researchers have set out to gauge the amount of peace journalism that is going on. There is probably no one piece of reporting that exhibits all five of the characteristics listed above, whilst also avoiding demonizing language, labeling and so forth. But distinctions do exist, and they have been measured. Reporting in The Philippines, especially by the country’s main newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is interesting in providing an effective counter to attempts by the country’s government to import the ‘war on terrorism’ ideology and apply it to a long-running insurgency. The paper I used to work for, the Independent of London, does a lot of peace journalism.

Then of course there are proliferating independent media, now building, through web-based platforms, on traditions long nurtured by alternative newspapers and community radio stations. There is some peace journalism, so there could be more.

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By Jake Lynch

Peace journalism has emerged, since the mid-1990s, as a new, trans-disciplinary field, of interest to professional journalists, in both developed and developing countries, and to civil society activists, university researchers and others interested in the conflict-media nexus. It offers both a set of practical plans and options for editors and reporters, and a basis for developing evaluative criteria for the critical analysis of war reporting – all derived from, or at least attentive to, propositions about conflict, violence and peace from Peace and Conflict Studies.
 
I have been at the forefront of this work since running a peace journalism summer school at Taplow Court, an agreeable stately home in the south of England which serves as the UK cultural centre of a Japanese Buddhist group, the Soka Gakkai International. The principal speaker was Johan Galtung, who coined the term, peace journalism; among the invited guests, Nick Pollard, then my newly-appointed boss as Head of News at British Sky Broadcasting.  

Galtung listened to Pollard’s presentation with mounting impatience. At the end, he said: “What you say is very interesting. But what is more interesting, is what you do not say”.  To home in on the unarticulated subtext of a speaker’s remarks is a hallmark of Galtung’s Transcend Method for conflict work.

He posits a dialogue with a “major person” from the government of a country involved in a conflict, where “a high level of verbal agreement”
emerges, both as to the causes of the difficulty and on what needs to be done to improve the situation. “But there is no acceptability in the sense of acting upon that consensus. There is unarticulated resistance” (Galtung and Tschudi, 2001: 218).  

The Taplow encounter could serve as a pattern for many an attempt to bring journalism and Peace and Conflict Studies to bear upon one another. The very concept of peace journalism effectively problematises mainstream reporting as ‘war journalism’. For there to be any point in calling for something new, there must be something intrinsically wrong with what we have now. For many practitioners, this is unwelcome and, indeed, counter-intuitive.  It is commonly assumed, Jorg Becker tells us, that communication is, in general, an agent of peace: better jaw-jaw, as Churchill said, than war-war.

But that reckons without the structuration and instrumental logics of mass media technologies, institutions, norms and practices. “The representation of violence in the mass media is part of the universal violence of the media themselves” (Becker, 1982: 227). Such propositions draw resistance from many journalists because they feel at odds with founding assumptions of their professional practice; assumptions that retain their power precisely by remaining unarticulated.

By causing them to be articulated, and simultaneously calling for improvements that can be presented as feasible and reachable for professional editors and reporters, peace journalism can emerge as a rallying point for change. It does not always help to introduce it, at the outset, by name.

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Jake Lynch is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Before that, he spent nearly twenty years in journalism, including spells as a newsreader and presenter for BBC World television, a Political Correspondent for Sky News and the Sydney Correspondent for the Independent newspaper. He reported on conflicts in the Middle East, South East Asia and South East Europe, as well as countless political and diplomatic meetings and developments in the UK and Europe.

He is the co-author, with Annabel McGoldrick, of Peace Journalism (Hawthorn Press, 2005), and his new book, Debates in Peace Journalism, has just been published by Sydney University Press and TUP-TRANSCEND University Press.

He also co-authored with Johan Galtung and Annabel McGoldrick 'Reporting Conflict-An Introduction to Peace Journalism,' also in Spanish, 'Reporteando Conflictos-Una Introducción al Periodismo de Paz' (Ariete, TRANSCEND México, Respuestas para la Paz, 2006).

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By TMS Editor 

In a nutshell, Prof. Johan Galtung defines Peace Journalism as follows:

Besides the usual questions, “How many were killed today?” and “Who is winning?” ask two additional ones: “What is this conflict about?” and “What are possible solutions?”

Contributions to the TMS website (whether Commentary or News) should adhere to five main principles, the ‘5 Cs’:

    * Be Creative
    * Be Constructive
    * Be Compassionate
    * Be Concrete
    * Be Concise

-1 and 2: Creative and Constructive – Write a solution-oriented piece; focus on proposed solutions acceptable by all parties, not only on identifying problems or blaming those at fault. Peace Journalism is not merely investigative journalism, advocacy, activism or description of events/violence - neither is it biased.  The TRANSCEND method has three steps:

         1. Identify the goals of the various parties involved directly or indirectly in a conflict, and possible contradictions between them;
         2. Distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate goals;
         3. Find creative solutions to transcend the contradictions and fulfill all the legitimate goals.

Although a peace journalist/columnist/commentator is not a mediator, s/he should be aware and offer a context not offered by most of the corporate business media that produces mostly war journalism. The key aspect is 'not biased,' meaning, not aligned with any of the parties.

-3: Compassionate - Commentaries must be respectful of all cultures and belief systems and not hurt or offend any group; compassion for all groups involved in a conflict - at least for their suffering. There is freedom of speech, and also the right to dignity and respect. Offending someone’s cultural values or sacred beliefs is not covered by free speech. The Danish cartoons mocking Mohammed (and even more the Danish Prime Minister's refusal to engage in a dialogue with Muslims) hurt the feelings of over a billion people and sparked avoidable violence. We wish to contribute to healing, not to hatred, pain and suffering. Compassion and empathy are concepts too often drowned in professional cynicism

-4: Concrete – Writings should not consist only of generalities but be concrete, specific and detailed, without assuming that the reader is already familiar with the matter/theme. Always identify on the first reference of a name or place. To the famous Journalism-101 questions: WHAT? WHO? WHEN? HOW? WHERE? WHY? we add: WHAT CREATIVE SOLUTIONS EXIST? Language and its reflective use is a medium to foster ideas and creativity, adding what mainstream media most often lacks.

-5: Concise - An ideal article has up to 1,000 words or 10,000 characters, is written in easily readable English and presents new insights, even surprises, to keep the reader’s interest. It provides a lucid and credible description of facts/events, informs, explains, puts events/actions/reactions, and so forth, in context for outsiders (foreigners) and for those who need/want to know and form an educated opinion.

The good peace journalist/commentator/columnist enables the reader to think further through diverse perspectives, and to identify the causes and all the parties to a conflict – not merely the simplistic A is applying/receiving violence to/from B – “and that is awful!”

S/he is not a missionary in a political sense, meaning, not a campaigner for an institution, nor an initiative, nor an organization.

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    * The editor reserves the right to edit all writings for clarity, grammar and spelling, and publish at his/her own discretion, based on content relevance.
    * Commentaries are uploaded every Monday; after one week they are transferred to Commentary Archives.
    * These guidelines apply to all direct contributors to TMS. The editor will post articles published elsewhere which may not be fully within these parameters but neither in conflict with them.

Comments/suggestions are welcome through 'Contact us.'

Antonio C. S. Rosa – TMS Editor
Johan Galtung/Jake Lynch/Nadine Bilke – TMS Advisors