Beyond peace journalism: Reclassifying conflict narratives in the Israeli news media (original) (raw)
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This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames.
Reclassifying conflict narratives in the Israeli news media
Open Acess LMU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), 2016
This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets-Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet-over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames
Journal of Peace Research, 2015
This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, an...
Constructing Peace with Media: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Global News Trends
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We juxtaposed war and peace journalism, based on Galtung's classification, to examine how leading providers of international news-the BBC World, CNN International, Al-Jazeera English and Press TV are responding to the call for a shift from war to peace agenda in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We coded for occurrences, approaches and language-use to determine the salient indicators of war and peace journalism. Overall, our finding shows a significant support for Galtung's description of war journalism compared to peace journalism. We concluded that peace journalism in global news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at present is more engendered by events of the peace process and we-arepeace-loving propaganda than conscious editorial drive towards peace. The notable presence of indicators of peace journalism offers a reason to believe that media are able to shape peace in Israel/Palestine through a more conscious application of peace journalism model, but also calls for concern on how bias might be represented in peace journalism.
Societies involved in intractable conflicts develop cultures of conflict because of experiences that have lasting effects on every aspect of collective life. One product of these cultures is conflict-supporting narratives that provide illumination, justification, and explanation of the conflict reality. These narratives are selective, biased, and distortive, but play an important role in satisfying the basic sociopsychological needs of the society members involved. In these societies, journalists often serve as agents in the formulation and dissemination of these conflict-supporting narratives. The present study analyzes the presentations of narratives of the culture of conflict among Jewish Israeli journalists during Israeli wars in Lebanon. It elucidates the dominant themes of the narratives by content analysis of the news published in newspapers and broadcast on television. In addition, in order to reveal the practices used by journalists in obtaining, selecting, and publishing the news, in-depth interviews with journalists and politicians have been conducted.
The current study aims to investigate the role of the news media within the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is based on a total sample of 165 articles, covering three specific events, taken from a range of Israeli and Palestinian news publications. After reading all articles published on each event for each news outlet, the articles were categorized into different themes. The theme that appeared most prominent throughout the coverage was then chosen and posited as a lens through which to analyze the coverage from. In doing so, the analysis could be more focused on issues that proved to be the most salient across the news publications in question. Through qualitative analysis of headlines, content and other features, this investigation seeks to identify points of ideological focus and political orientation, embedded within the language and the plethora of editing choices journalists and editors make in the process of news production. From this, wider conclusions were drawn about the role of Israeli and Palestinian media in what has come to be known as one of the modern world’s most intractable conflicts.
International Communication Gazette, 2014
A review of the literature indicates a plethora of studies examining the coverage of Middle Eastern conflicts, but hardly any research has been explicitly framed as being developed from a peace/war journalism perspective. The current study therefore represents a substantive effort to remedy this deficiency. It examines the extent to which the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident is framed based on Johan Galtung’s classification of peace/war journalism. A content analysis of 156 online stories from Haaretz, The Guardian, and The New York Times suggests overall differences exist among the war/peace narratives published in the three newspapers. The validity of few peace indicators used also was noted. The authors strongly advocate for the need to redefine indicators for peace journalism to reflect the concept as distinct from objective, and factual reporting. Finally limitations and future research are addressed.
Days of awe: The praxis of news Coverage of Violent Conflict
The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada (September 28ϪOctober 9, 2000). We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media (television news stations and newspapers) covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israel's Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse (mainly in concurrence with the politicians).
2014
This paper reports on an experiment that uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a natural laboratory for studying how recipients make sense of escalation vs. de-escalation oriented news articles. The results of the study indicate that media frames and individual frames have both a direct effect and complex interaction effects on participants' text understanding. Particularly the effect of media war frames diminishes if they are incongruent with participants' individual frames, and the propaganda function of reports about violence and human casualties can be neutralized if framed according to a peace frame. If participants had a priori positioned themselves in favor of the perpetrator, they may produce reactance, however.
Media, War & Conflict
In its search for media influences in violent conflict, most existing scholarship has investigated the coverage of specific, salient conflict events. Media have been shown to focus on violence, sidelining concerns of reconciliation and disengaging rapidly as time proceeds. Studies have documented ethnocentric bias and self-reinforcing media hypes, which have been linked to escalation and radicalization. However, based on the existing studies, it remains hard to gauge if the unearthed patterns of media coverage are generally pervasive or limited to a few salient moments, specific conflicts or contexts. Likewise, we cannot say if different kinds of media apply similar styles of conflict coverage, or if their coverage is subject to specific contextual or outlet-specific factors. In this article, the authors compare the contents of both domestic and foreign opinion-leading media coverage across six selected conflicts over a time range of 4 to 10 years. They conduct a diachronic, comparative analysis of 3,700 semantic concepts raised in almost 900,000 news texts from 66 different news media. Based on this analysis, they trace when and to what extent each outlet focuses its attention on the conflict, highlights specific aspects (notably, violence and suffering, negotiations and peaceful solutions), and presents relevant in-and out-groups, applying different kinds of evaluation. The analysis generally corroborates the media's tendency to cover conflict in an event-oriented, violence-focused and ethnocentric manner, both during routine periods and -exacerbated merely by degrees -during major escalation. At the same time, the analysis highlights important differences in the strength and appearance of these patterns, and points to recurrent contingencies that can be tied to the specific contextual factors and general journalistic logics shaping the coverage.