Covering Violence: 12 Points Of Concern

My dear all :
Next week I will participate at the Global Peace Summit in Bogota, Colombia, where (if the power is by my side) I will be a speaker trying to defend my “change of look” proposal into the media coverage, in front of 3 huge war correspondents!!! (ouch, I am really nervous!) http://www.cumbremundialdepaz2009.org/index.htm

Bu also, I will be leading a workshop about peace journalism. And precisely now when I was reading and preparing some materials for the workshop, among my documents I found this points written by Johan Galtung, (the peace journalism’s father) and I thought that it was a very good –and short- material to share with you.

If someone is interested on have the entire document please let me know (or better yet, write me an e-mail) to send it to you.

Hugs, Peace and as always, my total admiration to each of you :-)

Kisses: Xthina (and pleaaaaaasee!! wish me look, I am so excited but so scared as well !!) Xthina " )

Covering Violence: 12 Points Of Concern

l. Decontextualizing violence: focusing on the irrational without looking at the reasons for unresolved conflicts and polarization.

2. Dualism: reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved. Stories that just focus on internal developments often ignore such outside or "external" forces as foreign governments and transnational companies.

3. Manicheanism: portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as "evil."

4. Armageddon: presenting violence as inevitable, omitting alternatives.

5. Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes, like poverty, government neglect and military or police repression.

6. Confusion: focusing only on the conflict arena (i.e., the battlefield or location of violent incidents) but not on the forces and factors that influence the violence.

7. Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence.

8. Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage itself.

9. Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers.

l0. Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes.

11. Confusing cease-fires and negotiations with actual peace.

12. Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can help engender even more violence, when people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing.