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Using
Conflict Analysis in Reporting
The Peace
Journalism Option 3
By
Jake Lynch for Conflict and
Peace Forums
Conflict and Peace Forums
Taplow Court, Taplow, Bucks, SL6 0ER, United Kingdom
Phone +44.1628.591 233 / 239 Fax +44.1628.773 055
www.conflictandpeace.org
email info@conflictandpeace.org
Table of
Contents
1.
Introduction
Conflict Coverage
A new approach
Perspective: the fact and the
truth
2.
Practical Examples
Explaining conflict, framing
violence
Conflict or
meta-conflict?
Media responsibility
Practical reporting
decisions
Britain and Ireland
From "apportioning blame" to
conflict analysis in South Africa
Worthy / unworthy
victimhood
Consequences
Beyond 'victim journalism' and
'how do you feel'?
3.
Reporting of the 'Kosovo Crisis'
'The Serbs' - aggregation and
dis-aggregation
Disaggregation
Assumotions revisited
The KLA and the media
4.
Journalism and market forces
The rise of ethical purchasing
and investment
Two tentative
conclusions
5. Appendix: Middle
East
The view in international
media
References
About the author &
publisher
1.
INTRODUCTION
Journalists have become accustomed to vying with
estate agents and politicians as the profession least
trusted by the public at large. Complaints from readers,
listeners and viewers often echo the classic critique
scripted by Rudyard Kipling and delivered by his cousin,
then British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, nearly
seventy years ago. Journalists, he complained, wield
"power without responsibility - the prerogative of the
harlot throughout the ages."
The traditional response has been to plead, 'we just
report the facts'. In particular journalists in Western,
especially Anglophone media generally resist any
suggestion that the consequences of specific decisions
they make in reporting can be predicted in advance. The
logical corollary of this, that such decisions might be
made with reference to some sense of responsibility for
the consequences, is only permissible in certain tightly
circumscribed situations. British newspapers and
broadcasters not mentioning the ethnic identity of
someone committing a criminal offence, except where it is
relevant to the story, is one isolated example.
In general, the belief that journalists 'just report
the facts' holds sway as a constitutive assumption of the
work journalists actually do. But in doing it, many are
increasingly struck by the inadequacy of this theory as
an explanation for the way really things work.
In a media-savvy age of spin and chequebook
journalism, it is increasingly clear that facts are
provided or created - at least partly - for reporters to
report. Sources for stories are constantly adjusting,
presenting or even devising their newsmaking behaviour in
the first place, in order to get on the news for purposes
of their own. Something which applies to members of the
public featuring in 'human interest' stories as much as
to politicians and their media teams. To report these
facts is therefore to imbibe an agenda, whether
acknowledged or otherwise; an agenda always already built
into the facts even as they occur.
Neither is it useful to ask who put it there: after
all, newsmakers can only know what to do or say, in order
to be reported, by studying previous reporting. 'Just
reporting the facts' is a model of the process as a
linear sequence of cause and effect. In this model,
events arise 'spontaneously' of their own accord, in
precisely the way they would have arisen, whether anyone
ever thought journalists might report them or not; only
then do newspeople enter the process by arriving to cover
them.
In many instances, modern conditions of newsgathering
can only be understood by remodelling the process as a
positive feedback loop. The reporting of a fact or
statement in a helpful or gratifying way feeds back into
the calculations and creates an incentive for more of the
same - for a similar fact or statement to be provided
later. The converse is also true - if the story 'goes
wrong' from the perspective of the source, the incentive
is then to offer something different.
So any and every piece of reporting adds another layer
to the cumulative influence of news on the collective
understanding of journalists' likely response to facts or
statements provided for them to report. The precise
nature of this influence is always the result of
conscious news decisions about what to cover and how to
cover it. These decisions therefore condition the nature
of the facts likely to occur in future.
Conflict
Coverage
For all the diversity of today's media, it is still
possible to discern a typical pattern of decisions made
by most journalists when covering conflicts, and to use
this model, the positive feedback loop, to predict the
influence of the pattern of decision-making on the kind
of facts likely to be presented and/or provided for them
to report in future. The classic journalist's portrayal
of conflict is as a titanic tug-of-war, a zero-sum game
between two parties, played out along a single axis and
consisting entirely of violent exchanges.
Put it like this, and any inch gained by one side can
only be the same inch lost by the other.
A framing of the conflict which requires one
unambiguous winner, and one equally clear loser, as the
outcome.
If violence is the only thing or the main thing being
reported, it appears to be its own cause: the attack by
side 'A' explained as retaliation for the earlier strike
by side 'B'. It leads inevitably to the question, 'who
started it?' - the answer to which, of course, always
depends on how far back you go. Crucially, with no other
issues being reported as possible causes of the violence,
the behaviour of the side which 'started it' at the
chosen point of origin can only be explained as
irrational or evil. These are factors which merit no
serious analysis, cannot be 'reasoned with' and demand
that the party in question be coerced instead into
'backing down' from its unreasonable stance - or face
'punishment'. A logic which makes violence seem to make
sense as a means of settling disputes.
A new
approach
Conflict & Peace Forums is one of a number of
groups to have developed and experimented with a new
approach, drawing on the insights of conflict analysis
and transformation theory and aiming to suggest broader,
fairer and more accurate ways of reporting.
• Instead of a tug-of-war, the first priority is
to frame a conflict as a round table, consisting of many
parties, many issues. A complex, interlocking pattern of
fears, inequalities and resentments which can only be
overcome by seeking, devising and implementing complex,
interlocking solutions.
• For that it is necessary to insist on parity of
esteem for needs and suffering in place of worthy and
unworthy victimhood. The emphasis is therefore less
likely to fall on a search for someone to 'blame', and
more likely to lead to an examination of the
structural/cultural factors which perpetuate the
conditions for violence. They now appear as 'the
problem'.
• The structure and culture of a conflict are
shared - and contributed to - by all the parties. Because
'blame' cannot therefore be pinned on one, demonised
party, suddenly it makes sense to balance and neutralise
those factors if the conflict is to be transformed into a
non-violent phase - not something you can do with more
violence.
• This 'pulls the focus' of reporting to
penetrate the meta-conflict &endash; often in the form of
familiar 'positions' as articulated by official sources
on each side &endash; through to an examination of how
the real conflict, the pursuit of incompatible goals,
bears upon the lived experience of people in the conflict
arena and thus perpetuate the conditions for
violence.
• Portraying the nuance and complexity of lived
experience, with an equal esteem for the needs and
suffering of all parties, can transcend the tendency to
lump all stakeholders together into two 'sides' or
aggregates &endash; vital in framing the conflict as a
round table of many parties, many goals.
• Which is the better story - familiar bellicose
rhetoric from the leaders or 'official sources' of one
party; or creative ideas for transforming or resolving
the conflict, even if suggested by others?
• What, indeed, is required to resolve or
transform a conflict? Compromise, where all the parties
end up accepting less of the same thing they were seeking
in the first place - or the creativity to transcend
existing agendas and devise a hitherto unimagined way
forward?
• What does a resolved or transformed conflict
look like? Can peace be measured by visible effects alone
(a signed document plus a ceasefire), or must invisible
effects, including stored-up guilt and trauma, be taken
into account?
• Who makes peace - elites in halls of
negotiation, or the people who must live with any
eventual settlement? Or both?
Professor Johan Galtung, director of the international
TRANSCEND network of invited scholars and practitioners
for peace and development, diagnoses traditional
reporting of conflicts as a condition he calls 'War
Journalism.'
He invites us to imagine the debilitating effect by
transposing it to the work of health correspondents. It
would amount to "a news blackout on everything we
associate with medical practice" - all that would be
reported is the advance of disease. "That kind of
journalism would be disease-orientated, and the
journalist could refer to himself as a disease
correspondent. His concern would not be to highlight how
diseases might be overcome, except by means as violent as
the disease itself (eg open-heart surgery, chemo or
radiotherapy). The softer approaches would go unreported;
so would anything known as preventative medicine."
Perspectives, 'The
Facts' and 'The Truth'
Typically, in 'War Journalism', privileged
perspectives are camouflaged as facts, using phrases
which have become classics of journalese: 'said to be';
'thought to be'; 'it's being seen as'. Osama bin Laden is
'said to be' a Saudi multi-millionaire and 'thought to
be' responsible for the 1998 American embassy bombings.
Talks take place between Western envoys and authorities
in Belgrade: 'it's being seen as clarification, not
negotiation'. Instead, the approach presented here offers
ways to:
• Equip audiences to interrogate perspective, and
to alert them to a world consisting of many different
perspectives.
• It directs them to the question, who wants me
to know or believe this, and why?
• In place of the time-honoured journalistic
quest for 'the truth', singular, it recognises many,
contingent truths. The most important thing may be to
understand how and why some truths are routinely
commended to our attention, while others are ignored or
suppressed.
CONTINUE
TO PART 2
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