Effects of Journalism on War

Thesis Statement

The main purpose of this research report is to discuss the effects of journalism on war. Throughout history, citizens have relied on journalists to provide their information about wars. In the modern era, the media plays an increasingly significant role in warfare. The desire of the media to tell the public what is going on can often conflict with the government's desire to limit public information.

Discussion

Several scholars, most famously Johan Galtung, have argued that the standards of journalism in Western society favor a biased "war journalism." In war journalism, the media portrays conflicts as battles between two sides, good and evil, and fails to portray the nuances of any given situation. The history of conflicts is often ignored, and instead, often, war comes to seem the natural result of recent tensions. Blame and triumph - the notion that there will be only one winner per battle - are highlighted, as are the acts of battle themselves, as opposed to post-conflict reconciliation processes. Analysts that view traditional reporting as such are concerned that the emphasis on black-and-white war stories actually promotes war and stymies, or at the very least do not help, burgeoning movements for peace.

The psychological effects of exposure to news reports of conflict were studied by in-depth interviews with a group of UK professionals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including both women and men. In each case, subjects watched two versions of the same story, reported in a television news format and produced in the war journalism and peace journalism styles. Previous studies have found significant differences in cognitive responses to newspaper articles about conflict, versioned similarly to showcase these two contrasting approaches. Separate studies have found measurable negative psychological responses to watching television news per se, without differentiation into war journalism and peace journalism. This study assesses the differential psychological effect of these two styles. It uses a qualitative approach, in which interviews are conducted according to a Grounded Theory method and results categorised and processed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The results suggest that war journalism triggers more and more serious negative psychological feelings than peace journalism.

Peace journalism, therefore, is likely to include material on the background of conflict, showing direct violence as an intelligible, if dysfunctional response to identifiable conditions in social reality. It is likely to highlight non-violence as an alternative response people make, or can make, to the same situation. It seeks and represents a multiplicity of dividing lines, as well as potential for common ground, among conflicting parties, and it interrogates stated agendas and self-presentations, providing clues and cues for readers and audiences to negotiate their own readings of propaganda. Using similar distinctions, Kempf (2005) found significant differences between cognitive responses, among the same subjects, to newspaper articles containing elements of content categorised as “escalation”, and to three re-written versions: “(a) with increased escalation-oriented framing, (b) with moderate de-escalation oriented framing and (c) with more determined de-escalation oriented framing of the events”.

Szabo and Hopkinson exposed a group of undergraduate ...