Peace journalism

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Peace journalism is a style and theory of reporting that aims to treat stories about war and conflict with balance, in contrast to war journalism, which peace journalism advocates say display a bias toward violence. The theory proposes practical methods for correcting biases in stories appearing in the mainstream and alternative media, and suggests ways for journalists to work with other media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict.

This concept was proposed by Johan Galtung.^[1] Other terms for this broad definition of peace journalism include conflict solution journalism, conflict sensitive journalism,^[2] constructive conflict coverage, and reporting the world.^[3]

War journalism is journalism about conflict that has a value bias towards violence and violent groups. This usually leads audiences to overvalue violent responses to conflict and ignore non-violent alternatives. This is understood to be the result of well documented news reporting conventions. These conventions focus only on physical effects of conflict (for example ignoring psychological impacts) and elite positions (which may or may not represent the actual parties and their goals). It is also biased toward reporting only the differences between parties, (rather than similarities, previous agreements, and progress on common issues) the here and now (ignoring causes and outcomes), and zero sums (assuming that one side's needs can only be met by the other side's compromise or defeat).^[4]

Peace journalism aims to correct for these biases. Its operational definition is "to allow opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict".^[5] This involves picking up calls for, and articulations of, non-violence policies from whatever quarter, and allowing them into the public sphere.