Constructive conflict coverage – A social-psychological research and development program

Peace journalism is a relatively new research area in psychology which emerged in the last decade of the last century. Building on findings from social psychology (group processes, social influence, conflict research, attitude change), propaganda, and enemy concept research and on models of conflict management and the constructive transformation of conflicts, an investigation is made of the factors that determine the escalation oriented bias of conventional war reporting, and of how this can be transformed into de-escalation and/or peace oriented conflict reporting. This paper provides an outline of this research and development program in six sections: (1) Interest Perception, (2) Task Formulation, (3) Basic Theoretical Assumptions, (4) War Discourse vs. Peace Discourse, (5) a Two Step Model, and (6) Journalist Training. Wilhelm Kempf conflict & communication online, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003 Constructive conflict coverage – A social-psychological research and development program  2003 by verlag irena regener berlin 2 1. Interest Perception The media were for a long time mainly considered to be channels for the dissemination of news. Only recently has there been a change in way they are viewed. Today the media is seen as taking a more complex role for foreign policy (Naveh, 1998, 2002). They make a vital contribution to the construction of the environment in which foreign policy is carried out. This applies to both the national and the international media. The national and international discourses are closely interwoven and journalism plays a key role in this. The view that journalists are not simply neutral reporters and that they have an effect on political events has also strongly influenced the self image of journalism and has led to the emergence of two opposing tendencies which try to change the nature of journalistic responsibility. The first, a new school of journalism called the “journalism of attachment” (Bell, 1997) is already established. This assumes that, in view of the atrocities associated with modern warfare, journalists must not distance themselves from the events they are reporting. Journalists must side with the victims of the war and explicitly insist that something be done. The trouble with this “journalism of attachment” is that it largely foregoes conflict analysis, sees war as moral antagonism between “good” and “evil”, and its own task as putting moral pressure on the international community of nations to take sides and intervene using military means. This moral imperative allows journalists to abandon their professional rules and standards of truthfulness in the name of a higher moral duty. The reporting of the war in BosniaHerzegovina is full of examples of how journalists attempt to do justice to their noble moral goals by both suppressing and fabricating news (Hume, 1997; Kempf, 2000a). The second of the above tendencies is (still) mainly an academic project. Influenced by the Gulf War and the war in BosniaHerzegovina, peace researchers and media scientists have begun to think about how the influence of the media can be used for the prevention and constructive transformation of conflicts. (Galtung, 1998; Kempf, 1996, 1999a; Kempf & Gutiérrez, 2001; Luostarinen, 2002a; McGoldrick & Lynch, 2000). An attempt has been made, in the form of training courses for journalists, to communicate the findings of peace science to journalists and to use these to improve journalistic work. Starting with the Conflict and Peace courses held in 1997/98 at Taplow Court near London, where an attempt was made to do this, such further education has recently been provided by, among others, Transcend (see http://www.transzend.org/), the Conflict Resolution Network Canada (see http://www.crnetwork.ca/) and within the International Civilian Peace-keeping and Peace-building Training Program (IPT) at the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR). Here the “peace journalism” project looks critically both at the role of the media as catalysts of force (Kempf, 1994; Kempf & Luostarinen, 2002; Kempf & Schmidt-Regener, 1998; Luostarinen &.Kempf, 2000; Nohrstedt & Ottosen, 2001) and at the professional ethical norms of journalism.