Peace Journalism: The State of the Field
What are the most exciting developments in the field of peace journalism today? And who is leading the charge? Professor Annabel McGoldrick, professor of peace and conflict studies, offers her thoughts.
Q - Where have peace journalism methods been most successful?
A: Probably in the Philippines where they set up their own conflict sensitive reporting initiative, Pecojon – peace journalism network with training courses; story ideas and discussions. There’s more to learn about the work of this organization in Jean Lee Patindol’s “Building a Peace Journalist’s Network From the Ground: The Philippines Experience.”
Q -What are the organizations and networks that are leading peace journalism's implementation and progression?
A:There is now a biannual publication called The Peace Journalist from the Global Peace Journalism Center at Park University, Missouri, which is doing important research in the field.
Also Mindanews, based in Davao City in the Philippine island of Mindanao, is a news cooperative that reports on issues of conflict and peace using peace journalism principles.
Q-Some research has suggested that social media tends towards the more positive and empathetic in comparison to traditional media sources. Is peace journalism likely to find social media a more conducive environment?
A: The communication scholar, Manuel Castells has said: “The rise of insurgent politics cannot be separated from the emergence of a new kind of media space: the space created around the process of mass self-communication”. Insurgent politics entails adding new voices and new perspectives so in that sense the process of mass self-communication, chiefly social media, is conducive to PJ. On the other hand, social media are a largely unregulated space so it is difficult to uphold the journalistic remit of factual reporting.
Q - Has any new research added to or potentially contradicted your own work, i.e. your research on psychophysiological audience responses?
A: I think this is a relatively new field and measuring emotional responses to anything is pretty new and complex. At the moment we’re all just confirming what intuitively makes senses in terms of audiences responses to peace journalism and are metaphorically just groping around the dark for the technology to measure what are actually very subjective responses. Many of us can testify to number of occasions where the media is part of the problem, rather than the solution.
Other research on audience responses to PJ include Christoph Daniel Schaefer’s “The Effects of Escalation vs. De-Escalation-orientated Conflict Coverage on the Evaluation of Military Measures”, as well as Wilhelm Kempf’s “Experimenting with de-escalation oriented coverage of post-war conflicts”.
Annabel McGoldrick is a lecturer in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney. She has previous experience as a TV news reporter and also works as a psychotherapist.
