To bring peace out of invisibility

INTERVIEW/ Jake Lynch

Australia’s Jake Lynch, a former professional journalist and now Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney has a long road traveled behind him. having worked for the BBC, the London Independent and Sky TV. He has covered conflict in the Middle East and South East Europe and South East Asia, and has become an ardent proponent of Peace Journalism, a concept that is not as straight forward as it seems.

“Most journalism you see out there is war journalism. That is not to say it is the product of war journalists. Conventional journalism covers conflict poorly; it highlights violence, it under represents complexity, it omits information on peace-based initiatives. If anything, conventional journalism feeds violence and war, which is why I call it war journalism.”

Peace journalism instead, means reporters are urged to think critically, not necessarily to advocate peace, but to give peace a chance. In the following exclusive interview to Comunidad Segura, Lynch discusses bringing peace out of invisibility, his defense of a global standard for conflict reporting, and how to overcome situations of social impasse, when the headlines and the sources are the same over and over again. “When all else fails”, said Jake, “journalists must be creative”. Read on and find out how. 

Why do you call most of the journalism we see 'war journalism'?

The dominant convention of most journalists in most places, is to recount a narrative of events, and not processes, and what that means is you tend to get an account of the violent acts, of the clashes of the conflicts.

What is missing in conventional journalism?

What you are not accounting for, what you get much less of, is why people are engaging in conflict, we need to report on the process that has led to a violent event and the underlying causes of the conflict.

What is the problem with focusing on events?

Conventional news coverage of conflict and violence results in all parties of the conflict, including political leaders and policy makers, to some extent thinking all the time on how they are likely to be reported. Because of that, what they are likely to do is propose as remedy policies that also concentrate on violent responses….

How does the media play into this?

Clearly if the reporting is not making visible the underlying causes of the conflict – then there is no real dividends in media terms to address them in a way of alleviating it.

This is just one example of the ways that war journalism is receptive to war propaganda.

Could you give me a specific example?

This has been really the underlying ideology of the war on terrorism… The proposition that terrorism is something on which you can wage war, that war is a remedy for terrorism that will make it go away, depends on the proposition that terrorism just arises, that the people who do it are either mad or bad and that that is all you need to know about it.

When you begin to inquire into why and how this form of political violence obtains this appeal, attraction in particular social media, time and place, then you start to say what is needed (as a remedy to terrorism) is justice, development, is a little more equality… you need to address people’s genuine historical grievances.

In other words there are two alternatives there, either you have a war on terrorism, or you have a strategy that looks at the root causes and tries to address them.

Better journalism, means bringing peace out of invisibility?

If you are prepared to explore the background context of conflict then it begins to make sense to hear about peace initiatives. If there is no background, no context, what point is there for peace initiatives?  If you allow for a broader range of causal factors, you also immediately broaden the range, scope of peace initiatives developing the story. In this respect, the Philippines media is one example I came across, it is also inventive in picking up quickly and broadcasting suggestions for peace in various ways from all sorts of different people.

The British media also come out with small but significant amounts of peace journalism. In the UK coverage of the Iran Nuclear Crisis, it produced a figure of 15% of peace journalism.

But one would imagine Peace Journalism, is for elite or specialized publications, not for the masses?

Clearly there is more scope for peace journalism in Broadsheet newspaper than there are in tabloid newspapers, to use that terminology. That is not to say you cannot do peace journalism in the popular press. The UK's Daily Mirror, for example, came out with very good peace journalism in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, of course it was an anti-war newspaper at the time. There was a reasonable amount of peace journalism in publications such as The Financial Times, the Economist, the Spectator Magazine.

 

You advocate a global standard for peace journalism?

I am involved in research to use Peace Journalism to establish a global standard for reporting conflict. By that I mean journalism that is capable of being fitted in to the procedures of the international standardization organization which gives out quality assurance credentials. 

Companies in any field in any center around the world and can adopt certain practices and the standard accrediting body in their own country will decide whether they are worthy of quality assurance method or not, and once they have won it, they can use it as a marketing tool.

My hope is that we will be able to do this, establish this global standard, and that standard news agencies around the world will begin to work with news organizations to ensure that there is more peace journalism. That would be a way to change the structure in which journalists work and thereby opening the scope for peace journalists.

It means you would be able to rate a story or series in terms of how they use their sources, etc…

 

First of all, when reporting conflicts, you need to find ways of  including background contexts, offer plural accounts. It is not enough to just confine themselves to the big bang of what exploded where…

Secondly you’d have to make room for people who are proposing, suggesting, developing and advocating peace initiatives of whatever kind, regardless of whether those people are your usual sources or not.

Ask yourself: Are you presenting the conflict as a giant tug of war, two parties striving for a single goal, or are you finding a way to present the conflict as multiplicitous, a multifaceted picture of it, that is, a conflict with many parties, with many goals, which may have many internal divisions.

The foundations of Peace Journalism being?

Are you bringing us news about peace? Success stories? There is an interesting internet venture at the moment called the Peace Channel, its commissioned a small amount of video footage, and coverage of its own, its first one was to send a camera crew back to Kenya months after the electoral violence, and find that remarkable progress had been made in reconciliation.

The argument is that if you have that kind of coverage you are doing a better job at peace centered journalism, and peace centered journalism is better journalism and therefore it deserves a global standard of quality and reach the audiences.

Isn’t bad news better news?

Bad news is news, and it should be news. If something bad happens, we should not be inured to it happening; we should be alert when it happens, the issue is not whether to report bad news, but it is about how to report it…are we only bringing people a series of problems, or do are we going to hear from people who will give us insights into what the solutions might be.

Is this concept appropriate for non war situations, such as urban violence, gang warfare…

Again the same criteria apply, Peace journalism in that situation would explore the social formation and the opportunities and obstacles available to people from fulfilling their potential, it would comment on those issues underlying causes of the violence, it would pick up on the without doubt enormous number of community level initiatives to mitigate that violence. Don’t tell us about the problems, tell us what the solutions are. The peace journalism model is a good fit for that kind of conflict, just like for international conflict.

What about when the media is stuck in the same cycle of news and sources? Interviewing the same 5 or 6 sociologists and covering repetitive violent events?

 

What you have got there is a Peace Building Gap, as defined by conflict theorist John Paul Lederach. Related to his famous notion of the Justice Gap is a second one called the Interdependence Gap. That means, yes academic sociologists might agree on the nature of the problem, what is to be done. But what is at stake is the sheer non-responsiveness of the institutional framework. If that is the case then journalists have to be more creative in devising alternatives.

Finally can you give us an example of this creativity?

I can give you two. One is Northern Ireland. NI was beset for a long conflict, the time came for the government to propose peace talks, there were all sorts of private negotiations already. Everybody was waiting for the verdict by the biggest party in NI, the Ulster Unionist Party, would they join the peace talks? They effectively held the future of peace in their hands. Their MPs in parliament were said to be evenly divided on this issue. Then a Newspaper in NI called The Newsletter, read by a majority of supporters of this party had an opinion poll with that included the following question:  Would you be in favor of the Ulster Union Party joining the peace talks? The result was 86 percent yes. Once that was done, the Ulster Union Party did join the talks, they reached a peace settlement, and the situation there is now much better. The newspaper was frustrated by the interdependence gap and found a way around it.

Another example, here in Syndey, Australia. Our previous administration, the Howard government was skeptic of the concept of man-made climate change. This was a problem for the newspapers because they were pressured by the public to discuss the topic. The Morning Herald, thought up a very interesting idea to put climate change in the agenda. They campaigned to get everyone in the city to switch off electric lights for an hour. After that they published the before and after photos on the front page. It placed climate change in the agenda, and it became one of the issues in the elections, eventually contributing to the end of the Howard government.

Read Further:

The Peace Channel

"Peace Journalism" the book.

Peace Journalism at Wikipedia

From Comunidad Segura:

An American experience in crime reporting