Peace journalism
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).
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.
[19] Thirdly and lastly, 'dualism' biases journalistic objectivity towards violence: "A decision to tell a story in that [bipolar] way can slip past, unnoticed, without drawing attention to itself because of its close resemblance, in shape and structure, to so much of the story-telling we already take for granted".
Reporting was highly reactive and focused on the visible effects of the conflict, such as announcements and public disagreements between official spokespeople that appeared to disrupt peace efforts.
[25] Coverage was oriented to elites with little mention of non-official peace efforts by individuals and groups such as the Hand in Hand network of schools, the Israeli/Palestinian The Parents Circle Families Forum, Peace Now, Breaking the Silence, Physicians for Human Rights, Machsom Watch, and Checkpoint Watch, Hanan Ashrawi (non-violent activist for human rights, founder of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council).
Events demonstrating non-violent responses to the conflict were also ignored, an example being the March 12, 2011, Conference on Civil Disobedience in the West Bank marking the centenary of International Women's Day.
[39] The prefrontal cortex, governing working memory, rational attentive functioning, and complex thought is inhibited by activation of the brain's fear centre, the limbic system.
But Zaller (1992), Kahneman and Tversky (1984), and Iyengar (1991), among others, suggest that on most matters of social or political interest, people are not generally so well-informed and cognitively active, and that framing therefore heavily influences their responses to communications".
These include feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, compounded by increased anxiety, mood disturbance, sadness and a sense of disconnection with physical and social environments.
[43] This can affect reactions towards the conflict itself, and an audience's general psychological wellbeing, which biases their view of the world as excessively chaotic and may cause serious anxiety and emotional difficulties, and a sense of disempowerment and disconnection.
Lynch (2008) shows how these two disciplines are important anchors for conflict journalism in that they employ the academic rigor of the social sciences including: "openness about – and prepared to justify – starting assumptions for both observation and interpretation; and peer review.
[69] Lynch and Galtung (2010) present an important example of this in the case of North and South Korea, indicating that journalists should not ignore the grassroots people that endure this conflict, and that comparisons and input from the reunified Germany may be helpful, as could consideration and dialogue with East Asia.
These insights challenge the psychological tendencies of war journalism noted above to present negative outgroup behaviour as the result of stable group characteristics.
[74] This would involve demonstrating a pattern of coverage that leads present and potential peace actors to predict that their efforts will be reported by journalists to "create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict".
The Cairo based Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Translation (CIDT) seeks to build bridges of understanding between the Arab and Western world through analysis of the news from these regions.
This report however is generally closed in space and time: with little exploration of the reasons behind the conflict between warring groups (including considering the conduct of the weak national government), or whether parties other than Al Queda/Al Shabab have used violence, and assumes that causes and sources of solutions are restricted to within Somalia itself.
[83] These critiques are reflected in the Press Institute of India's conflict reporting guidelines that states: "Factual accuracy in a single story is no substitute for the total truth.
Thus "mounting anomalies may expose contradictions, and herald a paradigm shift" as local pro-peace perspectives previously consigned to a zone of "deviance" become "legitimate controversy".
[89] In the lead up to the presidential election in Afghanistan in mid 2009, an unusual example of this relationship-sensitive approach to counter-insurgency was applied by US troops in the Nawa district, of Helmand province.
However, the overwhelming majority of attention that Nawa district received in 2009, the year that this new strategy was first applied, was on reports of violence there, principally in early-to-mid July, during intensified military operations.
[90] In fact, relationship building has succeeded, in contrast to violent methods, in winning "hearts and minds" in Nawa, Afghanistan, but also on a larger scale in Iraq.
In acknowledging the importance of (at least being seen to) build cooperative relationships with local populations (over simply violently suppressing disagreement to military policy) the legitimacy of these non-violent responses to violence conflict is reinforced.
And indeed researchers also note the importance of relationship building for 'vertical and horizontal integration' in peacebuilding[92] to support the sustainability of institutional reform[93] and in promoting 'peace with justice' and respect for human rights.
[95] Exploration of new types of relationships between Afghan locals and the international community contradicts assertions made at the time, with the support of war journalism, by insurgents and the US government, that the negative effects of foreign occupation could only be ended with their violent expulsion, or that 40,000 more combat troops were the most critical component for sustainable peace in Afghanistan.
[97] While this may be a common response to journalism which advocates context, it is also an example of many of the social-cognitive inter-group biases noted above, and exemplifies what social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prison Experiments) calls a Fundamental Attribution Error: "the tendency to explain observed behaviour by reference to dispositions, while ignoring or minimizing the impact of situational variables".
So to give cultural or structural explanations of violence is not the same as saying that these social influences override the role the individual choice (which is located in a lower stratum and therefore occurs under different conditions).
However Peace and conflict studies suggest that, given the failure of the psychological, medical and social sciences (including education) to eliminate the persistent rates of psychotic tendencies in human groups (psychologists estimate that on average 3 percent of any population have psychotic tendencies),[101] a more promising approach may to look at what social, economic, cultural conditions and what inter-group relations enable individuals such as Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Stalin and Pol Pot, to realise their desire for mass violence.
Lynch (2008)argues that "for audiences to produce oppositional or negotiated readings of media messages assumes they have enough directly relevant personal and social experience against which to measure them",[112] This is often not the case with international conflict.
[118] This is an important illustration of the consistent effect of war journalism across general audiences: "the pattern of misunderstanding almost exactly matching ... missing elements from the story habitually presented in the mainstream media".
Galtung himself challenged the participants to: "imagine a future Middle East they wanted to see, and start to think aloud, in cross-national groups, about how they might play a part in bringing it about".
