Peace is War:

Epistemological and Ethical Concerns in Peace Journalism's Theory, Praxis, and Practice

Nicholas Gilewicz
Temple University

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Abstract
Peace journalismjournalistic practice attempting to critique and correct war journalismarises
from structuralist analysis, has culturalist aims, and emerges as a normative media frame. 42
recent publications about peace journalism's theory, praxis, and practice indicate the field's
failure to fully consider its own discursive structure and suggest epistemological and professional
problems that parallel those of war journalism. To support peace journalism's admirable ethical
aims, proponents should attend to refining and strengthening its theoretical bases.

Keywords: conflict studies, epistemology, journalism studies, media ethics, peace journalism.

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Introduction
Journalism has a long history of reporting war, and journalism studies has a substantial
history of studying war reporting. Pacifism and its academic outgrowth, peace and conflict
studies, stand in opposition not only to war, but also to structures that support it. Peace
journalism, a professional adaptation of those positions, purports to offer a solution to ameliorate
conflict and what the field's proponents view as the deleterious effects of war journalism.
Peace journalism is variously articulated as "a 'journalism of attachment' to all actual and
potential victims" (Galtung, 1998), as something that occurs when journalists create a space for
the public to contemplate analyses of and solutions to conflict that do not rely on violent means
(Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005a), and as a revolutionary political practice to ensure the "right of
all" to communicate in journalistic ways (Keeble, 2010). In recent years, media scholars' interest
in peace journalism has accelerated in parallel with the adoption of Johan Galtung's peace
journalism prescriptions by journalist-academics Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick in the late
1990s. A growing number of empirical studies have sought to useand to testpeace
journalism in academic research. In turn, an evaluation of recent theoretical debates in peace
journalism, of how those debates reflect or respond to previously problematized issues in
journalism studies, and of how recent empirical studies apply peace journalism concepts has
become increasingly necessary.
This paper focuses on articles that clearly articulate theoretical facets or underpinnings of
peace journalism, and that clearly relate those theoretical aspects to communication scholarship.
The intent is not to comprehensively address the history of peace journalism or to be a complete
assessment of the field.1 Rather than addressing the entire field and journalism's relationship to
1

For insights into peace journalism and conflict theory, see Peleg, and for a wider-ranging discussion of war and
peace journalism literature, see Ross.

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peace studies, this paper's concerns are peace journalism's epistemology, its relationship to
journalism studies, and its potential contributions to journalism practice.
Peace journalism is a highly problematic concept. It is heuristic, as a model that both
critiques and proposes an alternative to war journalism. It is normative, prescribing a journalistic
response to conflict situations and advocating a journalistic practice with specified goals. It is
transnational in scope, but relies heavily upon critiques of objectivity that emerged through study
of United States news media. It has structuralist origins, but culturalist aims insofar as it attempts
to increase the number and types of voices and messages reflected in news stories about conflict.
And peace journalism's agenda raises numerous questions about the role journalism should play
and how it should play itin creating or improving knowledge about the world.

Structuralist origins, culturalist aims

Galtung and Ruge's (1965) seminal paper "The Structure of Foreign News" focuses on
how world events become news stories. In this model, media actors perceive world events, and
transform them into "media images." Actual (that is to say, objectively real) events undergo
"selective distortion" as they become news stories. This model hypothesizes twelve conditions
that foreign events must satisfy in order to become news: frequency, threshold (of intensity),
unambiguity, meaningfulness, proximity (and concomitant relevance), consonance (meshing
with local understandings of the wider world), unexpectedness, continuity (having been in the
news before), composition, mentioning elite nations, mentioning elite people, personalization,
and negativity. Because "international action will be based on the image of international reality"
(Galtung and Ruge, 1965, p. 64), the authors propose that journalists should work actively to
counter these conditions, in order to better report on nationsespecially newly established

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nations emerging in the postcolonial eraidentified in this paper and others as "peripheral" (e.g.
Galtung, 1971).
Galtung's work in peace studies is consistently anti-imperialist, pro-peace, and counterhegemonic. Those traitsand concernsperpetuate themselves across peace journalism. While
the field of peace studies advanced in the decades following Galtung's early papers, peace
journalism did not fully emerge until Lynch and McGoldrick seized upon, refined, and became
international advocates for Galtung's vision. War journalism, according to Galtung, is war-,
propaganda-, elite-, and victory-oriented. Peace journalism is peace-, truth-, people-, and
solution-oriented (in Lynch, 1998b). Through peace journalism, they suggest that journalists can
resist distorting events. Because "information is never innocent, and no reporting is agenda-free"
(Lynch, 1998a, p. 69), peace journalism's proponents contend that peace-as-agenda should be
adopted.
This seemingly simple dialectic and corrective response is in fact quite complicated and
contentious. Critics have attacked this stance as "naive realism" (Hanitzsch, 2004, 2007b) and an
insufficient response to the "narrow nationalistic outlook of mainstream journalism" (Nohrstedt
& Ottosen, 2008). Ironically, much of this criticism is structuralist in origin, contending that
peace journalism does not accommodate structural issues such as media organization, journalistic
expertise, or political climatesall of which influence conflict coverage (Blsi, 2004).
Structuralism and culturalism are twin bases of Cultural Studies. The great contribution
of structuralism, according to Hall (1993), is its insistence on studying determinate conditions to
reveal the holistic nature of, and the ideologies behind, cultural structures. Galtung's structuralist
criticisms of war journalism are reactive, and the solution of peace journalism is oppositional.
Essentially, to counter the problems introduced by war journalism, the proposal is that journalists

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must enact its opposite.

In practice, then, peace journalism is actually culturalist in nature, particularly where it is
people- and solution-oriented. Where war journalism deals with official sources and examines
military victory and its likelihood, peace journalism looks to report wide-ranging effects of
conflict and seeks opportunities for conflict resolution and reconciliation. The intent of peace
journalism is neither conquest nor the reporting thereof; rather, it "calls for any and every peaceenhancing discourse, whatever its provenance, to be highlighted" (Lynch, 1998a, p. 65). Raising
news consumers' consciousness about the destructive effects of war on all humanitya role
fitting with the culturalist side of Cultural Studiesis the aim of peace journalism.

Truth-orientation, objectivity, and professional norms

A pointed critique of objectivity emerges from the structualist critique of war journalism.
Peace journalism's supporters contend that journalism's professional norm of objectivity
naturally sympathizes with war journalism. They argue objectivity leads journalists to favor
government sources over individuals, discrete events over ongoing processes, and dualisma
binary and oppositional story frameover a frame that values diverse perspectives on conflicts
(Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005a).
This critique of objectivity is well-grounded in journalism studies literature. Journalists
have used objectivity to rely upon official sources just because they are official, and to the
exclusion of other sources, in order to deflect criticism of their work (Tuchman, 1999; Bennett,
2007). Objectivity as a professional norm has created firm boundaries for acceptable news
subjects (Soloski, 1999), yet at the same time, the pursuit of objectivity for objectivity's sake
introduces bias into news stories that reflects the structure in which those stories are created

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(Bennett, 2007)precisely as Lynch and McGoldrick suggest it could.

Journalism studies scholarship does not necessarily treat these issues in structuralist
terms, but its work on journalistic routines is related. According to this line of thinking,
objectivity is not only ideology, but also social and professional practice. And in the structures of
all social practices, social influences are present.
The production of news is not just routine, but routinizedthat is, news production takes
place within a system that churns out news. That news, in turn, bears indelible marks of its
system of production (Golding and Elliott, 1999). News organizations offer interpretations of
facts and eventswhat Galtung called "selective distortion"while journalistic norms and
routines affect these interpretations. News practice itself can affect, create, or perpetuate the
biases of people working in the news, because of a reflexive relationship between reporters and
what they cover (Fishman, 1999).
Reporters are not outside of the frameworks in which they work; rather, they are a part of
what composes those frameworks. Their actions affect these frameworks; the frameworks affect
them. Numerous other examples from journalism studies reiterate the point that journalists
absorb the political expectations of their supervisors or owners (Breed, 1999), and that the
mechanisms of journalistic production at once defuse the potential for political conflict in the
newsroom and reinforce the political biases of a news organization (Siegelman, 1973).
Thus when journalists' attention turns towards war, conflict, and crisis on an international
scale, they bring interests and prejudicesboth professional and nationalto bear. For example,
Entmans study (1991) comparing United States news coverage of a KAL flight shot down by
the Soviet military in 1983 with that of an Iran Air flight shot down by the United States military
in 1998 revealed how coverage of these incidents parroted government perspectives and policies.

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And in international news, a very small number of gatekeepers have traditionally served a
very large amount of international news to what, ultimately, is a very large audience. These
gatekeepers determine the frame of international events, a seam in routinized newsgathering that
predictable, powerful or influential (usually governmental) sources can exploit. The danger of
bias affecting news is high: Once established, story stereotypes become fixed; countries,
leaders, and specific policies that gatekeepers have evaluated in particular ways may be
characterized that way long after the reality has changed (Graber, 2002, p. 348).
In Galtung's terms, "selective distortion" may be at work. But if objectivity as a practice
cannot produce an epistemologically objective representation of news events, and leads to a war
journalism that perpetuates war, then peace journalism, its obverse, may run into the same
epistemological problems (although its proponents would surely be pleased to perpetuate peace).
Thus, peace journalism must turn to the construction of knowledge.

The problem of epistemology

Peace journalism strives to be corrective, reparative and counter-hegemonic. In turn, it
seeks to inscribe a new preferred reading into news stories, one that runs counter to the dominant
ideologies it claims war journalism replicates. Critics of peace journalism retain objectivity as a
point of contention because they see objectivity as the epistemological foundation of journalism
(Hanitzsch, 2007b), an essential tool to pursue the goal of truthfulness (Loyn, 2007), and
"professional epistemology that assumes a transparent reality" (Nohrstedt and Ottosen, 2008)
that, in turn, constrains journalists' abilities to follow peace journalism's prescriptions.
According to Hanitzsch, Galtung is an epistemological realist because he believes
traditional war reporting to distort or misrepresent an objective reality. Peace journalism, under

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this logic, then aims to restore some sort of proper understanding of that objective reality. But
following on the argument in the section above, Hanitzsch (2004) argues that journalism cannot
offer an objective representation of actual reality: "war correspondents can only provide one
version of reality that is just as 'true' as numerous other versions" (p. 488).
This constructivist perspectivethat journalists can create meaning through their work
is the perspective to which peace journalism seems to turn. And in a later paper, Hanitzsch
(2007a) implicitly backs off his claim that peace journalism is realist, and aligns peace
journalism against philosophical objectivism (and thus with the constructivist ideas he espouses),
and also with empiricism, which requires that truth claims be justified through experience.
This is perhaps the fundamental tension in peace journalism scholarship: peace
journalism's intent is to further peace, or political opportunities for it; at the same time, it
requires journalists to go into the world to find stories ignored by conventional journalistic
practice and products. As a constructivist exercise, it aims to produce stories that actively
construct knowledge and promote peace; as an empirical exercise, it aims to uncover stories,
from some non-subjective reality, that better reflect the complexities of conflict situations.
At once, peace journalism has as its aims the active construction of knowledge, and the
derivation of knowledge from some non-subjective reality. These aims are not necessarily
unrelated, but they are by no means the same. Different approaches attempt to resolve the two,
including a journalistic application of standpoint epistemology, which "holds that less powerful
and marginalized members of society enjoy a certain epistemic privilege to see social reality
differently from those who dominate society" (Hanitzsch 2007b); "methodological
constructivism," which argues that reality "is the universe of states of affairs that is described by
true statements" (Kempf, 2006) and does not exist independently of those statements, and

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"constitutive rhetoric," which "assigns meaning to new symbolic processes through the
combination of social or historical narratives with ideological objectives" (Shinar, 2004).
Standpoint epistemologyat least this application thereofmethodological constructivism, and
constitutive rhetoric all seem quite like media framing.

Intentional encoding, culturalist framing

Michael Schudson (1978) has argued that objectivity is "a moral philosophy, a
declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions" (p. 8). By
attempting to ameliorate the problems created by objectivity in war journalism, peace journalism
is therefore a moral philosophy as well. In its attempts to inscribe into journalism about conflict a
new preferred reading that reflects an alternative moral philosophy, peace journalism prescribes
an active, conscious encoding. To use Hall's terms (1980), peace journalism attempts to construct
new connotative meanings, both to resist the hegemonic position of war journalism and to create
space for audiences to negotiate new meaningsthat is, to create new frames for the
understanding of news events.
Frame theory is frequently used to discuss political contestation and political hegemony.
Entman (1993) has argued that news media have become increasingly interpretive, and that
frames "promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or
treatment recommendation" (p. 52). Frames are "little tacit theories" (Gitlin, 1980, p. 6) that
determine how news stories are selected and presented. And through media frames, news
audiences lay claim to knowledge about events that they themselves have not experienced, a
point to be addressed later in this essay.
As a consciously enacted frame, peace journalism is a set of guidelines for journalists,

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and a set that can be determined from and studied in the text of news stories (Nicols, 2008).
Shinar's (2009) description of the march of peace journalism indicates a markedly culturalist
approach:
This has led to reframing the understanding of conflict from terms of a tug-of-war
between two parties in which one side's gain is the other's loss, to the terms of
relationships between various sides; to consider the context and the need to identify a
range of stakeholders beyond the sides directly engaged in a violent confrontation; to
understand the distinction between stated demands and underlying objectives; to identify
voices working for creative and non-violent solutions and ways to transform and
transcend the lines of conflict (p. 452).
This is the peace journalism frame; these are the new threads of a "web of facticity" (Tuchman)
that, if peace journalism has its way, will connote new meanings out of conflict.

Peace journalism in research

Forty-five years after Galtung identified structural problems with reporting news from
peripheral nations and issued the first call for corrective reporting, everything old is new again.
Studies to evaluate whether, how, and how successfully this prescriptive peace journalism frame
is functioning have yielded mixed results at best.
This research frequently has relied upon content analyses that turn tenets of peace
journalism into testable hypotheses (Goretti, 2007; Lee and Maslog, 2005; Lee, Maslog, and Kim
2006; Lee 2010; Mandelzis 2003; Mandelzis 2007; Shinar 2009), although some papers have
engaged in framing or narrative analysis (Fawcett, 2008; Ottosen, 2007; Rolston, 2007). The
content analyses have suggested journalism as a whole still tends towards and reflects the

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troubles of war journalism, although results often vary when interests parochial to the journalists
are not involved. Some of these find the routinized problem of reflecting primarily official
viewpoints to be ongoing (e.g. Mandelzis 2003), a criticism, as seen above, that is common to
journalism studies and peace journalism. Others derive further prescriptions for praxis and
practice, calling, for example, for journalists to increasingly follow the practices of peace
journalism (Goretti, 2007) or for peace journalism proponents to pay increased attention to
photojournalism (Ottosen, 2007).
The framing and narrative analyses of peace journalism show more clearly the ways in
which, as a frame, it often fails to accomplish its goals. In Northern Ireland, when a nationalist
newspaper and a unionist newspaper agreed to pursue editorial stances that would help foster
peace, according to Fawcett (2002), each became both politician and storyteller, crafting
narratives that reflected and perpetuated their politico-cultural biases even when purportedly
working to reconcile their respective communities. In turn, discursive structures within media
organizations may shape and constrain how journalists report newsnot dissimilar from the
earlier findings of Bennett, Breed, and Sigelman.
Framing can also have unintended consequences. A study of a series of BBC programs
intended to support reconciliation amongst victims and survivors of violence in Northern Ireland
found that it approached the situation as reality television. Thus, the series explicitly defined
reality, while framing out victims and survivors who did not fit an ideal type (Rolston, 2007). In
turn, this attempt at peace journalism excluded an "other" inappropriate to the framejust as war
journalism does.
And framing can even undermine the actual meaning of words. Between 2000 and 2007,
three different Israeli prime ministers, along with members of the Knesset, engaged in

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"oppressive peace discourse" which served "as a fig leave to hide or legitimate the initiation of
military actions, including wars" (Gavriely-Nuri, 2010, p. 566). The meaning of peace was
perverted to justify violent actions; to invert Orwell, peace is war.
The speeches of the prime ministers are especially relevant because as official discourse,
their meanings are likely to be replicated in news coverage. Indeed, a content study of news
discourse about the Oslo peace accords found that the overuse of peace terms undermined peace
perspectives and ultimately degenerated into war discourse. Peace became a negative term,
because official framing treated peace as of dubious value and questionable likelihood. Israeli
newspapers followed the degeneration rather than engaging in a "reconciliation discourse"
intended to seek understanding of the "Other" and to investigate how different stakeholders can
come together (Mandelzis, 2007). The peace frame, here and in Northern Ireland, has failed.

The trouble with representation

Lynch writes that because it can accommodate a wider range of voices from varied facets
of conflict, peace journalism is "clearly more accurate than war journalism, and preferable as a
form of representation" (Lynch, 2007a). But if even the concept of peace can be perverted by
official discourse and news discourse into justification for war, whether the frame of peace
journalism can accurately represent anything is up for debate. Lynch, like many journalists and
scholars of journalism, here fails to fully understand representation as it relates to news. While
accuracy is an aim of journalism, it also suggests that audiences map news stories onto a factcheckable reality implied by representation.
For all the stories in a print newspaper, few readers, if any, will have any direct
experience of the events reported therein. To claim knowledge of those events, a reader must

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make a leap of faith, and assume that the statements made in the paper are true, rather than
testing the truth-value of those statements themselves. Treating knowledge strictly, readers
cannot lay claim to knowledge of these events. What they can lay claim to is knowledge of
representations of those events. That newspapers published reports on events is true. The truthvalue of the underlying events, however, is indeterminate for most readers.
Thus, representation is reality for news consumersa point emphasized by Hall, in a
discussion of news from the conflict in Northern Ireland: Representation doesnt occur after the
event; representation is constitutive of the event" (qtd. in Stephens and Mindich, 2005, p. 373). If
this is the case, then the reports news consumers read or view about events and the
representations of actors in those reports become those events and become those people. Perhaps
more finely, the reports become news consumers understandings of events and peoplebut
pragmatically, these reports become reality for consumers who did not witness the events or
encounter the actors. The news reports, instead of representation, are the presentation of reality.
This is the process by which readers of newspapers claim knowledge about the
underlying events of news reports. Peace journalism's intent is to take advantage of this process,
and to present an alternative reality that creates space for nonviolent solutions to conflict. In the
best-case scenario, conflict resolution of any kind will "create a new reality" in which conflicting
parties are comfortable engaging one another, a situation Galtung (2010) calls "positive
transcendence" (p. 28).

Peace journalism as ethical theory

Peace journalism then, is a media frame actively constructed with moral intent. One

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implication of Hall's assessment that representation constitutes events is that, by constructing a

peace journalism frame, peace journalists engage in a propagandistic exercise themselves while
attempting to counter war propaganda. Following Durham (2003), by engaging in framing at all,
peace journalists may undermine the more discursive approach which they espouse, and
ultimately fall prey to a culturally dominant positivist ideology. This ideology may not
necessarily undermine Galtung's original dialectic critique of and proposed solution to the
problems of war journalism. But as currently promoted, practiced, and studied, peace journalism
relies upon culturalist and discursive approaches.
Some critics have argued that peace journalism does not go far enough in considering the
power that extant discursive news structures within newsrooms have to determine coverage
(Fawcett, 2002), although proponents have recently followed Foucault and contended that peace
journalism resists war journalism via discursive engagement within journalism practice (Lynch,
2010). However, the deliberately oppositional stance of peace journalism praxis, and peace
journalism's clear application as a frame, both question the extent to which its proponents
consider their own discursive structures.
So, peace journalism is a media frame established with moral intent. Yet peace
journalism's ethical strand is the one from which journalists, journalism scholars, and journalism
educators may derive the most value. Tehranian (2002) conflates media ethics and journalism
when defining peace journalism, and calls for a structuralist solution to the problem of war
journalism: a World Media Development Bank to prevent the "pious wishes" of ethics without
laws and to create "structural pluralism" in media ownership. The goal of such an organization
would be to counter the ongoing structural problems with reporting conflict detailed in the
aforementioned studies. Terzis (2008), like Tehranian, calls for structural changes, but in

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journalism education, intended to stop reporting the "Other" in binary, oppositional terms with
regard to the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. Similarly, Frangonikolopoulos
(2010) calls for Greek and Turkish journalists to more deeply consider the Other by working
collaboratively to report on Macedonia, and to understand that "the Other" is not "the Enemy."
El-Nawawy and Powers (2010) argue that Al-Jazeera English is doing just that, based on
content analysis and audience surveys. Considering the Other is vital because, they argue, peace
journalism neglects the role that collective identity plays in violence. They prefer the term
"conciliatory media," and suggest that such media would encourage "mediatized recognition" of
the Other.
Communication permits such recognition, even if it is mediatized, and even if it is a
construction of reality rather than reality itself. Christians (2010) contends that humanity is
"constituted by language" and argues that peace journalism's basis must be the consideration of
humans in relation to each other. Communication constitutes that relation. Through
communication we encounter the Other, and the ethical consequences are profound: "When the
Other's face appears, the infinite is revealed and I am commanded not to kill" (p. 15). Peace
journalism's intent is to remind news consumers of that command, and to remind journalism
practitioners of their ethical obligations to their field and to their publics.

Conclusion
So what, then, is peace journalism? Most of all, it is an ethical scheme, but one that has
yet to be fully grounded. Is it a deontological duty to the victims of violence? Or is it a
teleological concern with the consequences of reporting? From either perspective, it
reemphasizes the unique role journalists play in holding power to account, the numerous

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challengespolitical, social, professional, cultural, and discursivethey face in doing so, and
their unique ability to construct reality and thus promote specific social and cultural meanings of
events.
As this paper makes clear, the support for peace journalism is not always weak, but it is
muddled. Studies examining the extent to which news organizations perform peace journalism,
and how well they do so, have thus far yielded mixed results. From these results, scholars who
support the concept tend to derive further prescriptions for how peace journalism could be better
practiced, rather than questioning the tenets of peace journalism as a normative theory.
Following Fawcett (2002), scholars should pay increased attention to the discursive structures of
journalism as they evaluate the opportunities for and possibilities of peace journalism. Further,
proponents of the concept should increasingly reflect upon their own discursive structures,
especially in light of research questioning whether the peace journalism media frame can
successfully create a media space for contemplation and execution of nonviolent solutions to
conflict. Peace journalism has loose theoretical tethers, and drifts, somewhat unmoored, among
them. The field would benefit from studies that move it onto firmer ground.
Nonetheless, a call to resist the deleterious effects of war and war propaganda is surely
welcome. For example, while it has not issued a declaration of war since World War II, the
United States has been involved in undeclared wars or United Nations-authorized military action
for well over half of the intervening 65 years. This accounting of time includes only open
hostilities, not covert actions, which would likely extend it. In this situation, war journalism will
indeed fail, because journalists are reporting not on war but on state aggression. Politicians avoid
declarations of war to create the illusion of peace. And as with the discussion of peace in Israel,
in the United States, peace is war. To keep the peace at home, the War on Terror enters into

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conflict not with state actors, but with civilian criminals. The cost is high: the number of United
States soldiers who have died at "war" since September 11, 2001 exceeds by 50 percent the
number of United States residents who died as a result of that day's terrorist attacks. The
numbers of war injured and civilian casualties increase geometrically.
If the logic of war is poor, its ethics are perverse. Peace journalism's strengths lie in its
relentless insistence of ethical considerations, and in its demand that journalists report on conflict
from holistic and humanistic perspectives. In this way, peace journalism can call for journalists
not to abrogate their responsibilities, but to consider their work with increasing care and to
recognize that their work plays a role in how humans comprehend, and thus engage with, the
wider world. Surely, the professional duty of journalists is not, as peace journalism's proponents
might have it, to advocate and to negotiate peaceful solutions to conflict. But the relational
human duty of journalistspeople, above all else, who professionally use language to constitute
both humanity (as per Christians) and reality (as per Hall)might be.

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