Peace Journalism - Examples

Examples

As a pedagogical practice, peace journalism training often uses pairs of war journalism and peace journalism reports to illustrate how the same story can be reported in either style, and that there is the potential to produce peace journalism within the time and travel constraints of mainstream journalism.

For a peace journalism/war journalism pair on conflict in the Philippines see Peace Journalism in the Philippines. The transcripts of this report pair, along with an outline of a course in peace journalism can be viewed at A course in peace journalism.

For a pair of reports covering Israel/Palestine plus a link to practical tips for avoiding journalism that is biased towards violence and violent actors, see The Middle East—War Journalism and Peace Journalism The documentary News from the Holy Land also contains another pair of reports on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The free Reporting the World publication contains pairs of peace journalism/war journalism news reports on Macedonia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq,and Indonesia.

The Cairo based Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Translation (CIDT) seeks to build bridges of understanding between the Arab and Western world through analysis of the news from these regions. To Be an Effective Advocate for Peace, Media Distortions Must Be Addressed analyses situations where conflict reporting has contributed to the actual worsening of conflict.

An example from the Hindustan Times, showing how peace journalism can also operate through awards and commendations publicising and supporting the work of non-violence and cooperative conflict resolution: Afghan, Palestinian win UN award in honour of Gandhi.

Peace journalism can also take the form of the public dissemination of research on the successful conditions for non-violent conflict resolution and negotiation such as: Unequal Partners Can't Negotiate by Paul Duffill, writing for New Matilda.

For an example in Australia see this report on the protests of the 2009 US and Australian military exercises, Talisman Sabre.

TED talk by Julia Bacha on the danger of news about conflict only covering violent actors, excluding non-violent programmes Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence.

Budrus documentary film, telling the true story of the successful non-violent struggle of the people of the village Bubrus in the West Bank of Palestine.

Arab revolutions and the power of nonviolent action by Stephen Zunes, writing for the National Catholic Reporter.

Anne Applebaum argues in this piece for the Washington Post that though it is tempting to lump all the recent revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa into a single “Arab revolution,” or "Arab Spring" the differences between them may turn out to be more important than their similarities: In the Arab world, it's 1848 - not 1989.

This report from Michelle Shephard Somalia’s Al Qaeda: A chance for Shabab to negotiate? is an example of a partial PJ piece, where some elements of PJ are present. The piece does not assume there are only two parties, and doesn't assume parties' goals exactly match reported positions, and explores contradictory goals within a single official party. It also reports on peaceful responses to conflict. This report however is generally closed in space and time: with little exploration of the reasons behind the conflict between waring groups (including considering the conduct of the weak national government), or whether parties other than Al Queda/Al Shabab have used violence, and assumes that causes and sources of solutions are restricted to within Somalia itself. The report also does not explore non-elite efforts at peace, even though Somalis rally against al-Qaeda allies suggests that there is local support for peace efforts.