Peace Journalism: Principles and Structural Limitations in the News Coverage of Three Conflicts

Abstract

This study expands on the work in operationalizing Johan Galtung's classification of peace journalism and war journalism by describing and comparing the news coverage of three Asian conflicts—India and Pakistan's dispute over Kashmir, the Tamil Tigers movement in Sri Lanka, and the Indonesian civil wars in Aceh and Maluku. By including vernacular newspapers in the analysis, this study adds to a research locus that has largely been ignored. A content analysis of 1,973 stories from 16 English-language and vernacular newspapers suggests that, overall, peace journalism as an alternative to traditional war reporting is subject to a body of structural limitations that have not been previously addressed. Media and institutional constraints in the form of story characteristics such as language, story type, and production source as well as contextual variables such as a conflict's length and intensity shape the patterns of war/peace journalism framing. The findings suggest that structural changes are needed for peace journalism to evolve into a viable, mainstream approach to news coverage of war and conflict.