Peace journalism

Peace journalism has been developed from research that indicates that often news about conflict has a value bias toward violence. It also includes practical methods for correcting this bias by producing journalism in both the mainstream and alternative media, and working with journalists, media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict. Peace journalism has been developed from research that indicates that often news about conflict has a value bias toward violence. It also includes practical methods for correcting this bias by producing journalism in both the mainstream and alternative media, and working with journalists, media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict. This concept was proposed by Johan Galtung Other terms for this broad definition of peace journalism include conflict solution journalism, conflict sensitive journalism, constructive conflict coverage, and 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). 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'. This involves picking up calls for, and articulations of, non-violence policies from whatever quarter, and allowing them into the public sphere. 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. 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. 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. 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. Peace journalism came about through research arguing there's something wrong with typical conflict reporting. Research and practice in peace journalism outlines a number of reasons for the existence and dominance of war journalism in conflict news. 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.