Media coverage of third party peace initiatives : a case of peace journalism?

Abstract

Though the coverage of alternatives to violence can be regarded as a minimum requirement for peace journalism, it is not just the facts which are reported but rather the way they are presented which contributes to the escalation or deescalation of the conflict.An interdisciplinary and multinational content analytical study of the Gulf War coverage in American and European media has shown that alternative ways to settle the Gulf War were among those themes that were discussed most extensively in the media. Statistical data analysis based on Latent Class Analysis revealed a total of 9 latent styles of the media coverage of this topic: Pure military logic, query of military logic, economic rather than military means, coverage of Iraqi peace initiatives, UN peace initiatives, Allied initiatives, third party initiatives, query of third party initiatives, and comprehensive discussion of peaceful alternatives.Since the analysed style characteristics only dealt with informations on the Gulf conflict which were given or denied by the media and with arguments they corroborated or refuted, the identified styles describe patterns of information that were made available to the public. They do not describe, however, how this information was presented, what means of propagandistic featuring were used, etc. In order to investigate this aspect of the gulf war coverage, a qualitative content analysis of a sample of representative news items from the original study was performed. The sample included American, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish media. For each of these countries those news items were selected for qualitative analysis, which represented the various styles of coverage most clearly.