An investigation of the conceptualization of peace and war in peace journalism studies of media coverage of national and international conflicts

Abstract

According to Galtung’s articles ‘On the role of the media in worldwide security and peace’ (1986) and ‘High road, low road: Charting the course for peace journalism’ (1998), war journalism and peace journalism are two competing frames when reporting news on war and conflict. War journalists reactively report on conflict in a way that propagates violence, victory, and an elitist orientation. On the contrary, peace journalists proactively report on the causes of and solutions to a conflict, giving voice to all parties through responsible, empathetic journalism. By searching databases for multiple examples of qualitative and quantitative literature on peace and war journalism, new paths to best practices of how scholars articulate and measure the concepts of peace and war using content analysis methods can be found. This article reports on studies published in peer-reviewed journals that investigate the attributes of peace and war as they are conceptualized by scholars analyzing newspaper articles, television broadcasts, and radio reports within the context of peace journalism. Results suggest the majority of peace journalism studies examine media surrounding direct violence as it is occurring, and assess it most often by using the war/peace indicator of elite-oriented versus people-oriented.

Keywords

conflict reporting content analysis mass media peace journalism quantitative research war journalism

Introduction

Using a content analysis approach to understand how the concepts of peace and war have been measured in published articles regarding peace journalism is an important direction for communication research. Growth in this field calls for an understanding of trends and key features of this scholarship. This study provides a comprehensive search of multidisciplinary journals to assess how attributes of peace and war are conceptualized by scholars analyzing messages in the media to potentially inform them of how they might more consistently assess media, and how it shapes attitudes and perceptions around conflict and conflict resolution.

The extant literature includes at least 15 different dichotomous pairs of items by which scholars have conducted peace/war evaluations. In addition, Galtung’s (1996) categorization of violence into three types and Perry’s (2015) call for examining pre- and post-war periods are each evaluated to varying degrees in peace journalism studies. This research sets out to evaluate which criteria have been most regularly studied and used to evaluate peace versus war themes in past research.

Peace journalism research

Reporting conflict: War vs peace journalism

In recent years, peace journalism has become an area of interest for communication scholars, especially those who are concerned with journalists’ over-reliance on conflict as a news value. Consequently, journalists involved in war and conflict reporting must make a conscious effort to adhere to objectivity, a time-honored journalistic principle. However, research shows that war stories that journalists cover tend to suffer from sensationalism, identification with solely one side, and an overemphasis on material damage and human loss (Allen and Seaton, 1999; Toffler and Toffler, 1994). This type of reporting has been labeled war journalism where journalists use language of military triumph and an action orientation urging violence as a means to a resolution which sometimes causes even more conflict (Lee and Maslog, 2005).

Considered a pioneer of the concept of peace journalism, Galtung (1986) advocated that journalists should take a nonviolent approach when reporting conflict, and laid out practices and criteria that would allow reporters to accomplish this. As such, peace journalism involves taking a proactive approach, framing stories in a way that focuses on peace, minimizes cultural differences, and promotes conflict resolution (Galtung, 1986; Lee and Maslog, 2005; Lynch and Galtung, 2010). Galtung (1998) was critical of the ‘low road’ taken by news reporters who provided a superficial narrative with little background or historical perspective and challenged journalists to take the ‘high road’ in their reporting which was thought to promote a culture of reconciliation and peace.

Using both sports and healthcare metaphors, Galtung (2003) noted that traditional war journalism focuses on winning a zero-sum game; however, he suggested that war reporting should be modeled on health journalism where the medical reporter not only describes a patient’s battle with cancer (problem), but also apprises the patient about the causes of the disease (causes) along with various cures and preventative measures (solutions). Ultimately, Galtung (1998) believed a good war reporter would find ‘a clear opportunity for human progress, using the conflict to find new ways [of reporting], transforming the conflict creatively so that the opportunities take the upper hand – without violence’ (p. 23). The present research analyzes how frequently scholars have evaluated these elements of peace journalism in their research.

Operationalizing peace journalism

McGoldrick and Lynch (2000) expanded Galtung’s (1998) initial categorization of war/peace journalism in an attempt to explain what peace journalism is and how to use it. As a result, they offered 17 journalism-based practices that include avoiding portraying the conflict as consisting of only two parties, focusing on solutions rather than differences, finding ways to report on the long-term consequences of psychological damage and trauma instead of only discussing short-term visible effects, and using language that empowers people rather than using victimizing language that disempowers them. According to Lynch (2008: para 1), ‘Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices – about what to report, and how to report it – that create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.’

Consequently, peace journalism scholarship has been expanded through qualitative studies that have included interviews with journalism practitioners and their attitudes toward war/peace (Blasi, 2009; Brouneus, 2011; Neumann and Fahmy, 2016). More recently, peace journalism scholars have explored audience perceptions through surveys, which is a promising new direction for quantitative research (see Ibrahim et al., 2013).

However, the initial work done by McGoldrick and Lynch (2000), and Lynch and McGoldrick (2005), promoted peace journalism scholarship that has resulted in a multitude of codified war/peace language categories that have been used by researchers who have quantitatively examined media coverage of national and international conflicts (Fahmy and Eakin, 2014; Lee and Maslog, 2005; Lee et al., 2006; Lynch and Galtung, 2010; Nicolas, 2012). This growing area of peace journalism research is well anchored in agenda-setting theory and has relied primarily on content analysis of textual media coverage of conflicts using war/peace frames (see, for example, Batool et al., 2015; Lacasse and Forster, 2012; Lee, 2010; Lee and Maslog, 2005; McMahon and Chow-White, 2011; Nicolas, 2012).

Examining peace journalism

Some specific examples of the body of peace journalism work that have focused on content analysis of news coverage are discussed next. These studies have been identified to give a perspective of what this method has achieved in various international contexts. Furthermore, they highlight the unique way that war and peace have been operationalized and studied in recent peace journalism scholarship.

In her study, Lee (2010) expanded on Galtung’s (1998) operationalization of peace and war journalism, and used McGoldrick and Lynch’s (2000) 17 good practices in covering war to compare the news coverage of three Asian conflicts: India and Pakistan’s dispute over Kashmir, the Tamil Tigers movement in Sri Lanka, and the Indonesian civil wars in Aceh and Maluku. Based on a content analysis of 1,973 newspaper stories from 16 English-language and vernacular daily newspapers from four Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia), Lee uncovered a significant relationship between war/peace journalism framing and language, with English-language news stories being more likely to be framed as war journalism than peace journalism. Ultimately, Lee posited that peace journalism, as an alternative to traditional war reporting, is subject to a body of structural limitations that have not been previously addressed.

Batool et al. (2015) investigated whether government processes had any effect on print media coverage of Aman ki Asha (Hope for Peace), a campaign established in 2010 by two leading media houses with the aim for peace and mutual development of diplomatic and cultural relations between India and Pakistan. Rather than using Galtung’s (1998) or McGoldrick and Lynch’s (2000) multiple categorizations of war/peace journalism, these researchers employed agenda setting theory and framing theory along with a content analysis methodology to examine print media coverage of Aman ki Asha in Pakistani and Indian Print Media from January 2010 to January 2014. They discovered that both countries’ print media coverage of Aman ki Asha is playing a positive and constructive role by promoting peace and attempting to set a foundation for a peaceful future.

Neumann and Fahmy (2016), in their measurement of war/peace performance, proposed an index of conflict reporting which combined several practices linked to war/peace journalism. In this way, the researchers outlined 18 practices linked with war/peace journalism that were built on Galtung (1998) and McGoldrick and Lynch’s (2000) coding schemes in addition to other peace and war journalism items frequently utilized in content analytic studies. Ultimately, the researchers acknowledged that journalistic norms and values vary across nations, which suggests the need for scholarship that considers how peace and war are conceptualized.

Communication research and content analysis

According to Riffe et al. (1998: 20), content analysis is considered a ‘systematic and replicable’ analysis of texts that is commonly used for studying media messages. While this research methodology was primarily utilized by communication scholars, it has grown in popularity and is well represented throughout scholarly journals published in various fields because, as Riffe and Freitag (1997: 873) noted, it ‘helps a discipline improve’. Performing a content analysis of peace journalism articles that have utilized this same methodology to understand how peace and war are conceptualized is important as little is known about how these terms have evolved and been operationalized within the field of peace journalism.

A similar approach was taken in the area of health communication where Manganello and Blake (2010) conducted a content analysis of articles that used content analysis to study health messages in the media. Likewise, Lovejoy et al. (2014) employed a content analysis of published content analysis articles to examine reliability sampling procedures and reliability coefficients in three communication journals over a 26-year period. Understanding trends via this methodology is critical when attempting to assess developments in any field, and can potentially inform future studies by helping scholars maintain consistency and advance theory.

Research questions

Galtung (1996) categorized violence into three types: direct violence is the most obvious among the types involving killing, injury, kidnapping, and the like; structural violence deals with injustices that are built into social systems exploiting the majority and privileging the minority; the third is cultural violence wherein attitudes of superiority or inferiority regarding class, race, and sex shape assumptions that serve to legitimize direct and structural violence. Since the peace journalism research may not equally assess all three types of violence, this leads to the first research question:

RQ1: Which types of violence are analyzed most frequently in peace journalism studies using quantitative content analysis methods?

Galtung’s (2003) suggestion that war reporting should be modeled on health journalism means that coverage could be simply talking at the disease level, or it could diagnose the causes and report on a cure. These progressive levels of reporting depth then from most to least comprehensive include illness–diagnosis–therapy–solution oriented, illness–diagnosis oriented, illness oriented, and none. In this scenario, the illness equals noting the problem. Diagnosis comes from reporting on the cause(s) of the problem. The therapy and solution elements equate to reporting on possible solutions or ways to resolve the conflict.

RQ2: To what depth does quantitative content analysis of peace journalism assess solution orientation?

Avoiding war should not be the ultimate goal of peace journalism when the costs of not going to war would be greater (Galtung, 1990). Therefore, journalism about a conflict is best when it takes into consideration the costs of avoiding war in the pre-war or post-war periods in addition to the toll on humanity during war (Perry, 2015). Since peace journalism expects a broader view of conflict, examining structural and cultural elements as noted in RQ1, discerning how often prior scholars have examined the journalism preceding and following the period of declared war is in need of assessment.

RQ3: How frequently do peace journalism studies examine conflicts before, during, and after the periods of declared violence when using quantitative content analysis methods?

Of the many frameworks used by scholars who content analyze articles for peace and war frames, the largest number of frames seems to have been examined by Neumann and Fahmy (2016) in a recent study, perhaps because more and more frames have been identified over time as various scholars have built on this area of research. While numbers of frames analyzed seem to vary, examining which frames have been analyzed will provide a look at which are deemed most important overall.

RQ4: Which types of war/peace indicators are analyzed most frequently in peace journalism studies using quantitative content analysis methods?

Methods

Article selection

The goal of this study was to identify all articles related to peace journalism that utilized quantitative content analysis methods to examine how researchers conceptualized both peace and war. Multiple keyword searches were performed in commonly used comprehensive academic databases, including EBSCOhost, ProQuest Central, and SAGE. To limit the role of individual subjectivity, Lacy et al. (2015: 794) suggested ‘researchers should draw upon the literature and previous studies to assemble multiple keywords or keyword strings that offer more than face validity.’ Searching peer-reviewed journal article abstracts using the phrase ‘peace journalism’ and the term ‘media’ proved effective to this end since they were designated keywords in relevant articles. This search located 168 articles published from 1965 to 2016.

Consequently, all article results were reviewed manually to confirm the presence of both ‘peace journalism’ and ‘media’ in the article itself. Further refinement of the research criteria singled out those studies that analyzed newspapers, television news, and radio broadcasts, thus further defining media in order to maintain consistency and avoid the significant challenges that Lacy et al. (2015) identified when content analysts attempt to analyze ephemeral, unstable digital information such as online posts or Tweets. This search reduced the pool to 57 articles.

Finally, those articles that met this criteria were manually reviewed to identify those that used quantitative content analysis methods, and if the article did not specify this methodology, it was included if it used at least some predefined categories to analyze content and reported some quantitative results. This process resulted in 37 relevant articles. Additionally, four articles in related peace journalism books that also met these criteria were included so that a total of 41 articles became the focus of this study. The publication date range of these 41 articles is important to note as one was published in 1965, yet the remaining 40 were published from 2002 onwards with the most peace journalism articles being published during 2009 and 2015.

While Galtung and Ruge (1965) pioneered the concept of peace journalism as early as the 1960s, it became a topic of interest to researchers upon the publication of McGoldrick and Lynch’s (2000) seminal work titled ‘Peace journalism: What is it? How to do it?’ A few years later, Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) published a book titled Peace Journalism solidifying their position as leading figures in the global dialogue regarding peace journalism, and resulting in a proliferation of peace journalism research between the years 2009 and 2015.

Article review

Content analysis is a ‘research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) in the contexts of their use’ (Krippendorff, 2004: 382). It entails the ‘systematic reading of a body of text, images and symbolic matter, not necessary from an author’s or user’s perspective’ (p. 10). Riffe et al. (1998: 2) defined content analysis as the ‘systematic assignment of communication content to categories according to rules and the analysis of relationships involving those categories using statistical methods’. As such, a content analysis method was used to analyze article contents with the following information being recorded for each article: journal title, journal author(s), violence type(s), solution orientation type, coverage period(s), and war/peace indicator(s). Of these categories, only the four types identified as solution orientation were mutually exclusive as one article could potentially investigate more than one violence type, cover multiple periods, and include various war/peace indicators; however, an article could only qualify under one solution type given Galtung’s (2003) operationalization of this sequential concept.

The journal title and author(s) were recorded in a text field of a spreadsheet while violence type was considered in terms of the three categories of direct, structural, and cultural violence, which are derived from Galtung’s (1996) three divisions of violence. Solution orientation type was characterized as follows, given Galtung’s (2003) suggestion that war reporting should be modeled on health journalism: illness–diagnosis–therapy–solution oriented, illness–diagnosis oriented, illness oriented, and none. The articles were also reviewed and coded according to when scholars chose to analyze media coverage of the conflict. As such, three coverage periods were considered including prior, during, and after the said conflict.

Finally, when coding for war/peace indicator(s), Lynch and McGoldrick’s (2005) 13 war/peace language categories were utilized to ascertain which dual notions of war and peace were assessed by the various publications. These included the following: reactive/proactive, visible/invisible effects of war, elite/people-oriented, differences/agreement-oriented, focuses on here and now/causes and consequences, dichotomizes the good and bad/avoids labeling of good and bad, two-party/multi-party orientations, partisan/non-partisan orientation, zero-sum/win–win orientation, stops reporting and leaves after war/stays on to report aftermath of war, uses/avoids victimizing language, uses/avoids demonizing language, and uses/avoids emotive language. Furthermore, Galtung’s (1996) recognition of war/violence journalism as propaganda versus truth oriented and victory versus peace oriented was also included as part of the war/peace indicator coding.

Intercoder reliability

To assess intercoder reliability, two authors served as coders and created a spreadsheet to record article data. Both coders reviewed a random sample of the 41 articles which represented 22 percent of the total number of articles. Responses were compared and intercoder reliability was calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha. Intercoder reliability ranged from 0.74 to 1.0 for 19 of the 22 categories being coded. The three categories that earned low intercoder reliability included identifying cultural violence as a type along with assessing whether or not the research addressed the categories of uses/avoids demonizing language and uses/avoids emotive language. For these three categories, the coders had an extensive conversation discussing their interpretations of the categories and then agreed on a set definition for each category, including using examples to further clarify concepts.

Results

Table 1 presents data collected from the content analysis of 41 articles. To answer RQ1 regarding the frequency and type of violence investigated, 83 percent of the articles specifically examined direct violence, 51 percent considered cultural violence while only 32 percent analyzed structural violence. When coding articles, an agreed-upon definition for each type of violence was utilized with direct violence defined as being physically perceived and including war, murder, rape, assault, and verbal attacks. Cultural violence was coded as issues related to gender, ideologies, religion, and economic and political structures that veil direct and structural violence, and structural violence was defined as exploitations built into social systems (Galtung, 1996).

Table 1.

Characteristics of articles included in the study (N = 41).

Category	Number	Frequency (%)
Violence type
Direct violence	34	83
Cultural violence	21	51
Structural violence	13	32
Solution orientation type
Illness–diagnosis–therapy–solution oriented	27	66
Illness–diagnosis oriented	13	32
Illness oriented	1	2
Coverage period
During conflict	40	98
After conflict	19	46
Prior to conflict	16	39
War/peace indicator
Elite/people-oriented	29	71
Uses/avoids demonizing language	24	59
Visible/invisible effects of war	23	56
Two-party/multi-party orientations	22	54
Differences/agreement-oriented	21	51
Dichotomizes the good and bad/avoids labeling of good and bad	21	51
Partisan/non-partisan orientation	21	51
Uses/avoids victimizing language	20	49
Uses/avoids emotive language	20	49
Focuses on here and now/causes and consequences	19	46
Zero-sum/win–win orientation	19	46
Victory/peace oriented	17	41
Reactive/proactive	16	39
Propaganda/truth oriented	14	34
Stops reporting, leaves after war/stays on to report aftermath of war	10	24

Note: Numbers in each category except for Solution orientation type may add up to more than 41 due to multiple violence types, coverage periods, and war/peace indicators included in a study.

For example, Lee and Maslog (2005) examined direct violence by considering stories published in daily newspapers from five Asian countries involved in four regional conflicts surrounding terrorist attacks and armed forces. Batool et al. (2015) considered cultural violence by investigating whether government policies of India and Pakistan had an effect on the print media coverage of Aman ki Asha. Furthermore, while it may seem unlikely for a scholar to avoid assessment of direct violence when conducting a quantitative content analysis of peace journalism, this is possible as, for example, Hussain (2015) investigated media coverage of political communication that led to the disqualification of elected prime ministers.

While the categories answering RQ1 were overlapping and a single article could investigate all three types of violence, the second research question (RQ2) examined mutually exclusive categories. Regarding the frequency and type of solution orientation addressed in each article, 66 percent were illness–diagnosis–therapy–solution oriented, 32 percent were illness–diagnosis oriented, and 2 percent were solely illness oriented. No studies failed to assess at least how the media covered the problem, and all except one went further than that. So nearly all studies of peace journalism at least looked for whether the media provided some diagnosis of the problem’s cause, even if some neglected to code for coverage of possible remedies to the conflict.

Regarding RQ3, an overwhelming majority of the articles (98%) analyzed newspaper articles, television broadcasts, or radio reports during the identified conflict while 39 percent considered media that had publication or broadcast dates prior to the conflict, and 46 percent evaluated these media for elements published or broadcast after the stated conflict formally ended.

In addressing RQ4, 7 of the 15 categories of war/peace indicators were assessed more than half of the time, but only one of those categories was consistently analyzed more than 70 percent of the time. The most consistently used category by researchers was their examination of the use of elite vs people orientation (71%). Coding of the use of demonizing language (59%), the visible/invisible effects of war (56%), and two-party vs multi-party oriented news (54%) were used next most often. Three indicators were used in 21 of the 41 studies (51%): differences/agreement orientation, use or avoidance of a good/bad dichotomization label, and partisan/non-partisan orientation. Those categories that researchers assessed less than half of the time included both the use/avoidance of victimizing language and use/avoidance of emotive language (49%), a focus on the here and now vs the longer term causes and consequences (46%), framing the conflict as a zero-sum game vs allowing for a win–win orientation (46%), and an assessment of a victory vs peace orientation (41%). Whether news reports used reactive vs proactive coverage (39%), whether such reports presented propaganda or truth (34%), and whether news outlets stopped reporting and left or stayed on to report aftermath of war (24%) were analyzed least often.

Discussion

Galtung (1996) divided violence into three categories where direct violence is a physical violence that includes killings and massacres, structural violence is a form of violence that is intrinsic to people, social structures and institutions, and cultural violence is a symbolic violence that is present in societal norms such as religion and language. According to Galtung (2003), mainstream Western media tend to frame their reports in terms of war and violence which he called taking the ‘low road’ and described as a reporting model that is ‘of a military command: who advances, who capitulates short of their goals; counting losses in terms of numbers killed, wounded, and material damage’ (p. 177). Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) made similar claims explaining this occurs because of news values such as negativity, unambiguity, personification, and meaningfulness.

While this study confirms the beliefs of Galtung (2003) along with the findings of Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) by reporting that the majority of articles investigated direct violence when conducting their content analysis of newspaper articles, television broadcasts and radio reports, it also suggests there are plenty of opportunities for scholars to further the field of peace journalism by investigating cultural and structural violence as viable inequalities. Furthermore, this finding should encourage journalists to report on more than just physical violence especially since, for example, people’s economic, social, and political rights are at stake when structural and cultural violence is committed.

The findings regarding solution orientation type are positive in that scholars of the majority of studies that were analyzed as part of this research adopted Galtung’s (2003) health journalism approach when analyzing media coverage of the conflicts by not only investigating the problems and causes, but also considering solutions. In this way, these scholars are taking a more comprehensive look at how conflicts are covered as well as extending how conflict is understood. This is encouraging; for scholars only to assess whether news reports address the illness (problem) and/or offering a diagnosis provides a superficial picture that leads to an oversimplification of the situation. However, one third of the studies still failed to assess whether journalism was suggesting possible remedies, something Galtung (2003) called for. Likewise, journalists who only report on the problems and ignore, for example, the context and underlying causes of the issues at hand are not following a peace journalism approach by facilitating the public’s understanding of the conflict. Ersoy (2010: 83) clarified, ‘Peace journalists – instead of keeping a distance from the stories they cover – adopt a new approach of news reporting, which is solution-based and requires their direct involvement.’

It is not surprising that 98 percent of the articles considered in this study examined news reports during a particular conflict since conflicts are considered issues of high public interest and are widely covered by the media. However, according to Galtung (2002), a peace journalism approach includes media coverage that aims for the solution and de-escalation of conflicts which depends on media coverage prior to the conflict as well as after the conflict occurs. Taking a qualitative approach, Zillich et al. (2011: 263) analyzed German media coverage of international conflicts and discovered that international conflicts are very rarely covered once they have been settled even though journalists acknowledge the possibility of contributing to peaceful resolutions, particularly when their news coverage occurs during the phase of reconciliation. Furthermore, Shaw and Martin (1993) reported that studies investigating the media’s coverage of conflict at stages other than during the escalating phase are rare. Clearly, paying attention to the different phases of conflicts warrants further attention from both a pedagogical and practical perspective with less than half of the studies assessing the pre- or post-conflict coverage for its contributions to peace or war.

Thanks to Galtung (1998), who offered an initial conceptualizing of peace and war journalism, and then McGoldrick and Lynch (2000), who expanded Galtung’s definitions to include a multitude of journalism-based practices, scholars have had a framework for examining those reports written by journalists in the midst of various conflicts. This study assessed the frequency of both Galtung’s, and McGoldrick and Lynch’s war/peace indicators and it was determined that the war/peace indicator of elite-oriented versus people-oriented was most often used while the category of ‘stops reporting and leaves after war versus stays on to report aftermath of war’ was least often considered.

Assessing journalists’ reports using the war/peace indicator of elite-oriented versus people-oriented makes sense as it is relatively easy for scholars to determine whether journalists focused on the stronger voices involved in conflicts rather than giving voice to the voiceless. On the contrary, it is telling that researchers least considered the category of ‘stops reporting and leaves after the war versus stays on to report aftermath of war’. In this way, this finding potentially reveals similarities among researchers and journalists in that both parties have not made the consideration of post-conflict implications a priority.

Note that this particular category of ‘stops reporting vs staying on to report’ is similar to the question asked of the scholarship itself in RQ3, but they differ because the third research question is assessing whether scholars include journalism from time periods before and after the war in their analysis, and RQ4 examines whether reporters for news outlets are allowed to remain in the conflict zone and keep reporting.

The reasoning of easy identification and categorization can be used to explain why the next three indicators of uses/avoids demonizing language, visible/invisible effects of war, and two-party/multi-party orientations were most commonly used by scholars when conducting their content analyses. However, it is interesting that Galtung’s (1998) propaganda/truth oriented categorization along with his victory/peace oriented categorization were not utilized more frequently by scholars analyzing peace journalism materials. This finding may indicate that scholars are shifting away from using Galtung’s peace and war definitions, preferring McGoldrick and Lynch’s war/peace indicators or even using a different framework. Ultimately, while the percentage difference between each indicator is such that it is difficult to draw any overarching conclusions, examining the usage of these indicators warrants further attention in order to continue to explore the various frameworks scholars use to assess journalistic information.

Limitations

This study is not without limitations that need to be recognized. First, it is possible that articles related to peace journalism and that utilized quantitative content analysis methods were missed, especially articles in other languages. For example, searches were conducted in three commonly used comprehensive academic databases, but multiple information sources exist that publish print and electronic resources that may not have been indexed in these three databases. However, it is believed that the sample that was reviewed is representative of research in this field.

Second, Lynch and McGoldrick’s (2005) war/peace language categories along with Galtung’s (1998) war/peace indicators were used as the framework for coding when it is obvious that these categories are not the only way to analyze media in terms of their war/peace connotations. Future investigations should consider how researchers who do not rely on Lynch and McGoldrick’s or Galtung’s categories conceptualize peace and war. Third, this study is limited by its focus on solely newspapers, television broadcasts and/or radio reports as researchers have studied other types of media in relation to peace journalism, including photographs and internet-related sources such as social media and blogs (see, for example, Neumann and Fahmy, 2012; Ottosen, 2007). Finally, a quantitative approach cannot fully account for some important components regarding this topic, especially when dealing with different types of narratives. As such, it may be prudent for future investigations to consider the conceptualization of peace and war from a qualitative approach by investigating those studies that use, for example, critical discourse analysis as their primary methodology.

Conclusion

In exploring how peace and war have been conceptualized in peace journalism articles using a content analysis approach, this study expands on the important body of literature regarding peace journalism and how scholars might more consistently assess how media, including newspaper articles, television broadcasts and radio reports shape public attitudes and perceptions about conflict and conflict resolution. As noted by Nohrstedt and Ottosen (2015), ‘There is a need for a joint approach together with universities, colleges, training institutes, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)’ which include Reporters Sans Frontiers, International Journal Festival, European Council and United Nations to recognize the importance of the field of peace journalism in order to ‘make a difference when it comes to establishing journalism as an important contributor to international norm-setting and to raise the profession’s ethical standards with regard to violent conflicts’ (p. 221). Consequently, this study not only addresses a gap in the peace journalism literature in terms of understanding how scholars use content analysis methods to articulate and investigate concepts surrounding peace and war, but also helps researchers maintain consistency and advance both peace and war journalism theory.

While it is the duty of journalists who make it their goal to be ethically sound in their reporting by striving to seek the truth and report news in an accurate, fair manner, it cannot be denied that the same story can be told in many different ways. Peace journalism offers a viable set of alternatives for journalists to employ that take an analytical approach to conflict, and allow journalists to seek opportunities to not only project a multi-party conflict model, but also to seek out peace initiatives and report on them (Lynch, 2007). Thus, it is critical to conduct research surrounding peace journalism and for journalists to consider adopting this approach because, as Lynch and McGoldrick (2005: 57) pointed out, ‘News is supposed to be about change.’ As such, both researchers and journalists have the potential to be agents of change, helping to create the peace that is much needed in many of today’s communities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of PhD coursework through Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, USA.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Valerie Gouse is an assistant professor of English/Communications, Cumberland County College, Vineland, NJ, USA. Her research interests include listening behaviors and the ministry of presence. Her recent publications include an article in the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling on practicing the ministry of presence by police chaplains.

Mariely Valentin-Llopis is a visiting assistant professor of Communication at Barry University College of Arts and Sciences, Miami Shores, FL, USA. Her research interests are media and culture with a focus on Peace Journalism and immigration issues. She recently co-authored a chapter in a book titled Gender, Peace, and Sexuality: Issues and Perspectives in Higher Education.

Stephen Perry is an Interim Dean of the Robertson School of Government, the Director of Graduate Programs in Communication and a Professor at Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, USA. His research interests include media effects on public opinion, broadcast history, political communication, and media and religion. He recently published an article in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media on marketing the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition broadcasts and edited a forthcoming book titled Pro Football and the Proliferation of Protest: Anthem Kneeling and Standing in a Divided America.

Beryl Nyamwange is a doctoral Candidate at Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, USA. Her research interests include children’s media, religious media and applied communication research.

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