E-raamat: Discourse, Media, and Conflict: Examining War and Resolution in the News

"The media not only play vital roles in the mediation of conflicts and wars, they also are involved in discursive practices and cultural politics that predict the possibilities of social transformation and peace-building (Ivie 2016). The study of these roles in the context of local and global conflicts and peace-building efforts becomes more crucial in terms of how the professional practices of a journalist are defined. According to Carpentier and Terzis (2005), a journalist has the responsibility to adopt a particular model of war or peace reporting, such as those proposed by Galtung (1998) (i.e., peace-oriented journalism, which is generally perceived as people- and solution-oriented, or conflict/war journalism, which is violence-oriented, and tends towards propaganda). Citing Galtung (2000; Galtung and Fischer 2013), Nijenhuis (2014) argues that the media in the practice of war journalism are capable of exacerbating the conflict by: focusing on violence, highlighting the differences between groups, and presenting conflict as a zero-sum game, while ignoring the broad range of causes and outcomes of conflict . . . Audiences reading war journalism are served a simplified black and white image, which makes them more likely to support violent "solutions" to the conflict"--