Mainstream Media

9 Pages 2374 Words

sible whether or not it’s the truth and then support it with rhetoric about the righteousness of themselves.
Johanna Galtung, a professor of peace studies, defined 12 points of concern where journalism often goes wrong when dealing with violence:
1. 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.
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: Rather than addressing 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 impact of media coverage itself.
9. Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers.
10. 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.
The simple use of words they use to convey news can be an integral part in propaganda techniques. For example, they use euphemisms, words that pacify the audience with blander meanings and con...