Peace & War Journalism & Cultural Diversity
From: The Peace Journalism Option represents the findings of the Conflict and Peace Journalism summer school which took place at Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire, UK, over the week of August 25-29 1997.
THE NEWS VALUES of WAR JOURNALISM
Among the elements which seep unacknowledged into the mindset of war journalism from official sources is a general zero-sum analysis. Peace is defined as victory plus ceasefire. It does not allow for the possibility that a violent outcome may leave a conflict unresolved, to recur in the future - clearly a mistake in reporting the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
War journalism tends to focus on violence as its own cause and is disinclined to delve into the deep structural origins of the conflict. (This is a matter of professionalism - what doctor would look at a swollen ankle and diagnose an ankle disease? S/he would examine the cardiovascular system in the search for origins.)
After an episode of violence, war journalism concentrates on visible effects - those killed or wounded, or visible material damage, not damage to psychology, structure and culture. For example - when the Peruvian authorities deployed troops to lift the siege of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, killing all the terrorists inside, it was greeted by many reporters as resolving the conflict.
War journalism reduces the number of parties to two, so anyone who is not my friend is automatically my enemy. Throughout the weapons inspection crisis Washington was seeking to establish that Saddam Hussein had confronted the international community as a whole. At least until the divisions in the UN security council became too obvious to ignore, this was accepted uncritically by the British and American media. Even after this, French opposition to the use of military strikes, for example, was described as "foot-dragging".
Instead war journalism draws us/them polarities. As suggested above, stories purporting to offer the latest evidence of Saddam Hussein's wickedness and his weapons of mass destruction are put out by official information sources to demonise the enemy. The corollary of this is to humanise the participants on "our" side.
* War journalism requires clear winners and losers. Here, the sports archetype, where winning is the only thing, is most evident. It ignores or conceals peace initiatives from the other side or third parties, particularly any option for a non-violent outcome which does not give total victory to "our" side.
War journalism with its unacknowledged embrace of the aims of official information sources, extends from the conflict itself to the halls of negotiation - as at Maastricht. Again, here, the focus is on elites as peacemakers, with the emphasis on victory in a zero-sum game, and every move assessed in terms of who is having to give ground and being forced to make concessions. It seeks evidence of peace breaking out in the form of treaties and institutions.
