Audience Responses to Peace Journalism

Abstract

This article shows how results were merged from a study conducted in four countries—Australia, the Philippines, South Africa and Mexico—in which differently versioned television news stories about conflict were played to audiences, and their responses gathered through a mix of methods, to yield both quantitative and qualitative results. These versions were coded according to the Peace Journalism model, a set of distinctions in the representation of conflict, originally conceived by Johan Galtung. A Peace Journalism bulletin and a War Journalism bulletin were produced in each country. Viewer responses—both emotional and cognitive—showed significant differences, depending on which version they watched. This article compares selected stories in each country, which had the strongest measured effects in the original study, and identifies common thematic elements. The most significant of these is that, in the Peace Journalism version of each of the selected stories bar one, viewers were provided with the personal narrative of a carefully chosen individual protagonist, which prompted both their empathy and, through that, their cognitive engagement with counter-hegemonic arguments in favour of non-violent conflict responses.

KEYWORDS:

• audience responses
• Peace Journalism
• television news

Notes

1. The word “peg” is journalistic parlance for the event of the day that legitimises that story being commissioned on that day. In this case, the visit of a Democratic Alliance member of parliament to inspect how many of the houses promised by the ruling African National Congress had been built.