The Media as actor in conflicts resolution

INTRODUCTION

The media is an actor that ‘speaks’ rather than ‘acts’. Its primary role in conflicts resolution is to discover and report on conflicts, informing other actors of their existence and keeping them updated with how the conflict is unfolding as well as how others are responding to it. It may adopt a ‘watchdog’ approach, exposing conflict and criticising other actors for not responding to stop it, or a ‘mirror’ approach, simply reporting the facts. This unit focuses on the perception of and response to conflict by the media, as well as looking at how the other actors influence the media in their coverage of conflict

RESPONSE TO CONFLICT

Perhaps the most obvious trend in the response of the media to foreign conflict is that there is so little of it. In some ways, this is understandable. There may be 20 or 30 conflicts ongoing in the world at any given time, but the amount of time available for a single television news program maybe only about 20 minutes (minus commercial breaks). The vast majority of this time is devoted to domestic news, and sports and weather must also be included.

On national news programs, there may only be room for 2 or 3 foreign news stories. The same can be said for radio news. Even on 24-hour news channels, the same stories are often repeated in the following program, and developments on previous stories are followed up on. Newspapers may have more space to deal with, but domestic news dominates.

Within the limited space for foreign news, only a portion of this will be about armed conflict, there are other international stories that don’t involve violence. This means that the amount of reporting on foreign conflicts is highly limited. Within this framework there are a number of trends in the response of the media to conflict that will be dealt with below.

Concentration On A Single Conflict

The media has a tendency to focus the limited time and space they have for covering conflict in foreign countries on just one or two conflicts at any given time. Conflicts appear to be ‘chosen’, or considered as newsworthy, and extensive or saturation coverage is applied to following their progress.

Such coverage is likely to peak during the period of greatest violence, and then reduce as the violence subsides, and/or it is eclipsed by the next conflict. There May be a secondary conflict, one that receives a moderate amount of coverage compared to the ‘chosen’ conflict, but few other conflicts are likely to receive significant coverage, particularly^–in the broadcast media, where time is limited.

Looking at levels of media coverage in recent years, a clear pattern emerges. From late 1998, Kosovo was the central conflict dominating media attention. In late 1999 East Timor briefly emerged, and in 2000 limited fighting in Israel-Palestine became dominant. The terrorist attacks on the USA in September 2001 connected to the attacks on Afghanistan, and then from 2003 to the present Iraq has been the central conflict in the media.

Throughout this time Israel-Palestine has been in the unique position of relatively constant coverage (even if second place behind the dominant conflict), and recently Darfur has become a secondary conflict in the media. One thing these leading conflicts have in common is either direct involvement of Western armed forces, or a strong Western interest in the conflict area.

 In the first 3 months of 1999, for example, as a Western coalition prepared to attack Yugoslavia over the issue of Kosovo, the New York Times devoted roughly 15 percent of the space on its international pages to that conflict. In 2000, the amount of coverage CNN devoted to the conflict in Israel-Palestine was more than five times greater than the second-most covered conflict (in the Philippines).

In the same year, the coverage to that conflict in the Japanese newspaper, the Yomiur was also almost five times that of the second-most covered conflict (Hawkins, 2002). A study of the websites of three main global newswire services (AFP, AP and Reuters UK) in the first half of 2005 found that the top news items on their websites were dominated by news on USA, Iraq and Israel-Palestine (in that order). Combined, the coverage of these countries alone made up 36 percent of the top news items for AFP, 72 percent for AP, and 32 percent for Reuters UK.

Furthermore, with less time and space for coverage, the content must be simple, straightforward and easy to comprehend quickly. Conflicts are typically ‘framed’ in a morality play style, with one side determined as a ‘villain’ and the other side a ‘victim’, and ‘heroes’ are encouraged by this type of coverage to step forward and rescue the helpless victims.