Stig Arne Nohrstedt

Peace journalism: A proposition for conceptual and methodological improvements

The peace journalism (PJ) field now has an appreciable amount of published material to show for its first decade of serious operation, in research, teaching and training alike. It amounts to a serious project to reform professional education programmes in journalism. But so far, the proposed remedies are more individual projects than coordinated and organized reforms; they are scattered geographically and do not have a global scope. This article discusses the need for a joint approach together with universities, colleges, training institutes and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and inter-governmental organizations, if PJ is to contribute to establishing journalism as an important factor in international norm-setting and to raise the profession’s ethical standards with regard to violent conflicts. To enable this, further conceptual development is also necessary. A combination of Johan Galtung’s PJ approach, with insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA), offers a way of managing the demand for contextual reflexivity that has been raised in the debate about PJ. CDA offers an opportunity to address war and peace issues in a more comprehensive manner, integrating analysis of the propaganda discourses during peacetime, underestimated by Galtung in his model.

Ideological News Reporting from the Third World: A Case Study of International Newspaper and Magazine Coverage of the Civil War in Nigeria 1967-70

The article presents an empirical test of opposed positions in the debate over sources of imbalance and distortion in reporting of Third World affairs: are they due to ideological bias or to lack of journalistic freedom in the countries concerned? An analysis of coverage of the 1967-70 Nigerian civil war was made on newspapers and magazines in countries with different attitudes towards the Federal government and Biafran rebels — Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and the USA. The results confirm the influence of ideological factors, notably traditional colonial images and current foreign policy interests, but restrictions on access to news sources may also have had an impact.