{"id":4392,"date":"2010-04-10T07:57:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T07:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms2\/?page_id=4392"},"modified":"2021-09-28T12:37:50","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T11:37:50","slug":"2-peace-journalism-for-journalists","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/about-peace-journalism\/2-peace-journalism-for-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"(2) PEACE JOURNALISM FOR JOURNALISTS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"peace<\/a><\/p>\n

By Jake Lynch<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 all derived from, or at least attentive to, propositions about conflict, violence and peace from Peace and Conflict Studies.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Galtung listened to Pollard\u2019s presentation with mounting impatience. At the end, he said: \u201cWhat you say is very interesting. But what is more interesting, is what you do not say\u201d.\u00a0 To home in on the inarticulated subtext of a speaker\u2019s remarks is a hallmark of Galtung\u2019s Transcend Method for conflict work.<\/p>\n

He posits a dialogue with a \u201cmajor person\u201d from the government of a country involved in a conflict, where \u201ca high level of verbal agreement\u201d emerges, both as to the causes of the difficulty and on what needs to be done to improve the situation. \u201cBut there is no acceptability in the sense of acting upon that consensus. There is inarticulated resistance\u201d (Galtung and Tschudi, 2001: 218).<\/p>\n

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 \u2018war journalism\u2019. 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But that reckons without the structuration and instrumental logics of mass media technologies, institutions, norms and practices. \u201cThe representation of violence in the mass media is part of the universal violence of the media themselves\u201d (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 inarticulated.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So, for instance, our series of activities and publications for professional journalists in London, which ran from 2001-2005, was called, simply, Reporting the World, and took the form of a more inclusive proposition: to join a critical discussion about the reporting of particular conflicts, with input from those with visions for peace, and some who are working on the ground to mitigate, alleviate and transform the conflict in question (material stored at www.reportingtheworld.net<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The exercise led to some fruitful dialogues, and the publication of a handbook, reporting and reflecting on the discussions and also called Reporting the World<\/em>, which codified the peace journalism model into the following set of questions to ask of any piece of conflict reporting in UK media (with obvious adjustments able to be made for media elsewhere):<\/p>\n

* How is violence explained? <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n