Conflict and Peace Journalism
November 12, 2008

RADIO 2GB NEWS COMMENTARY 2nd April 1999

Holy Week has again been a time of suffering, when the message of hope has been overshadowed by conflict. Are we hearing too much about conflict and not enough about hope?

Taplow Court is near London and it puts on courses dealing with Conflict and Peace Journalism. With all the violence in Kosovo, Angola and elsewhere, a recent report on its courses makes very interesting reading: The Peace Journalism Option.

Professor Johan Gultung, one of the founders of Peace Studies, makes some observations about how war is reported. First, some people are more visible than others. Stories about elite people in elite countries are newsworthy. For example, hardly anyone in Australia had ever heard about Yemen until an Australian tourist was killed there a few weeks ago.

Stories which deal with structural change, especially if positive, which concern non-elite people in non-elite countries, are not newsworthy. Not all the countries in Africa, for example, are at war. Indeed, some African countries are doing quite well. But they remain invisible because Africa only gets reported for wars.

Second, “peace” is too often 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. This was an error in the way that the “victory” in the Gulf War was reported in 1991. On the contrary, Saddam Hussein is still in power and he has outlasted all of the people who opposed him. This is good advice for when we hear about the ending of the war in Kosovo. Will this be a real ending – or just a ceasefire until the round of hostilities?

Third, war journalism tends to focus on violence as its own cause. It does not spend enough time probing the deeper, structural causes of conflict. There is too much attention given to the types of weapons used rather than why they are being used in the first place.

The Taplow Court report also contains a statement from the US media academic Neil Postman, who has encouraged journalists to open up a new category in their work: not mere information, and beyond knowledge, to the use of wisdom. Knowledge cannot judge itself. Knowledge must by judged by other knowledge – and this is the essence of wisdom.

It is mere information to report that scientists in Scotland have cloned a sheep and that a monkey has been cloned in the United States. Meanwhile, a journalist is supplying knowledge when they explain how the cloning is done, how soon we may expect humans to be cloned and even something about the history of attempts at cloning.

But wisdom occurs when the journalist tells us about the system of knowledge we need in order to evaluate the act of cloning. This means going beyond just summarizing the official media releases and encouraging people to think about the deeper issues.

Therefore, if we fail to understand why there is, for example, a war in Kosovo in the first place, then we will be destined to having wars without end. We all live in Kosovo now.