Use Peace Journalism Do Not Focus On War

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The media of Central Asia, who informed about last week’s armed clashes and cross-border violence between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan must use peace journalism tools, according to the message of the School of Peacemaking and Media Technology in Central Asia.

Analysis of the media space showed that the armed clashes narratives dominated in daily news.

The audience received information on battles, victims, violence and military actions.

However, the media content was more war-oriented.

The media outlets published no materials focused on decisions offering and analysing various options of peaceful initiatives.

The School of Peacemaking encourages journalists and content creators to use peace journalism approaches. This approach helps editors and reporters to choose what and how to report on the events to consider non-violent response to the conflict.

 

Here are some recommendations to help you achieve this.

1. The principles of peace journalism suggest peaceful orientation, focus on facts, ordinary people and focus on solutions.

When preparing the material, ask yourself, "What can I do to help deescalate the conflict?”.

Use the method of "reaching the other side”, find common approaches for ordinary people divided by the war.

2. Do not define the sides to conflict by quoting their leaders only. Use the rule of 3 don’ts in your reports:
            - don’t mitigate the conflict;

            - don’t look for the guilty ones;
            - don’t replicate opinions and claims as established facts.

3. It’s very important to provide the audience with transparent conflict, to consider the armed clashes on the border as an issue by focusing on the conflict emergence.

 

4. You should focus in your report on invisible consequences of violence (traumas, structural/cultural damage).

 

5. When focusing on facts, you should disclose lies on all sides.

 

6. When describing consequences of armed clashes, focus attention not on the military, but on the heaps of people who suffer, women, the elderly, children. Give voices to minorities and find ordinary people who are peacekeepers.

 

7. When collecting information from available sources, you should rely on peacemaking approaches, and take into account the multilanguage context of the Central Asian media sphere. Information spread in various languages of the region and translated into local languages can contain inappropriate statements. Therefore, when publishing latest updates, it is crucial to check all statements for accuracy before citing and describing the events. 

 

 What NOT do to in your reports:

 

1.Avoid blaming those who started the conflict. Instead, try to find common issues.  

                                                                                          

2.Do not cover the conflict as having only two sides contending for one goal. The logical outcome of this is that one wins and the other loses. A peaceful journalist should "separate” these two sides into many smaller groups, thus reaching many goals and unleashing the creativity to reach more outcomes.

 

3.Do not let the sides define themselves by citing their leaders only. Instead, detect true goals:

How does the conflict affect people in their daily lives?                                                             

What changes do they want?                                                                                                  

Is the position stated by their leaders the only one or the best outcome?                                                                                                                               

4. Avoid assessing the merits of the violence policy in terms of its visible effects only. Instead, try to find some relatively invisible effects, e.g., long-term consequences of psychic trauma. It’s likely that the injured people can be violent in future against other people or groups can stand against other groups or other countries.  

 

5. Avoid using such adjectives in reports and news as "vicious”, "cruel”, "ferocious”, and "barbarian”. They always describe one side’s viewpoint of what the other side did to it. Instead, report that you know about the offence and provide as much information as you can.

 

13. Avoid using such clichés as "terrorist”, "extremist”, "bigot”. They are always given by "us” to "the other side”. No one ever uses them to describe oneself. And a journalist using these clichés is thought to take sides. Instead, try to name people as they name themselves.

 

14. Avoid expecting for leaders’ statements from "your” side for further decisions. Instead, seek peaceful initiatives, whatever their origin.

Now, when the media sphere is filled with misinformation, it is important to shape public opinion for creating peaceful initiatives.

 

It can be done with analytical and investigative reports, where the focus is on conflict occurrence, its investigation, which can help avoid possible invisible

consequences.