Western Media on Foreign Crisis

MA-Thesis / Master von Amalia Oganjanyan

Der Studiengang International Media Studies wurde in Kooperation von der Deutschen Welle-Akademie, der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg und der Universität Bonn eingeführt.

Introduction:

Motivation:

As the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 started, I had just arrived in Germany. At the time, nobody ever really believed that military actions would ever take place between the two countries, though there was a lot of talk about the possibility.

During the first days of the war, while in Germany, it was challenging to get information from the Georgian media. Later I learned of the hacker attacks on Georgian websites, and also that people in Georgia could not visit any Russian websites. I was having trouble even contacting my family through land telephone lines. It seemed that the information war between Russia and Georgia had gained strength. Russia Today was describing Georgians as the worst villains, and CNN was expressing its empathy towards Georgia. It was a confusing atmosphere of an enormous amount of discrepancies.

After the war, there were a lot of manipulations and speculations about the causes and the flow of the military conflict. This triggered my reflection on whether media of directly involved parties under the combat circumstances can stay balanced and unbiased. Both Russian and Georgian media seem to face significant challenges related to media independence because of the relatively short and fragile democratic development taking place in both countries. It may be naive to expect an absence of bias from media organizations from either country; instead it would be more plausible to look to media of third countries to play a neutral observer role. Certainly, every media and every country represents its own interests but nobody speaks about ideal configurations.

During my master study at the Deutsche Welle, I attended a seminar on the peace journalism which motivated me to come back to my previous questions and try to find out whether the reporting on the Russia-Georgia war was conflict-sensitive or balanced in any way. The conflict between Russia and Georgia is an ongoing conflict with varying phases of escalation and de-escalation. Visible and invisible consequences of the war are still unresolved such as insufficient care of the refugees, inexact data of casualties and other issues.

Statement of problem and research question:

People are always curious about what happens outside their own countries, about, so called, foreign news abroad, particularly when it touches their own country. The last circumstance channel the news into a new path - foreign news at home or home news abroad. These issues are concerns of theories of foreign reporting that originated in earlier centuries.

Conflict reporting, or war reporting, is a field of the journalism which attracts the attention of scholars. This genre does not only include the transfer of information and opinion on conflict but also some basic knowledge of conflict studies and a discussion of the role and influence of media in the comprehension of conflict.

Foreign conflict reporting is one of the most controversial and quickly developing areas of research. The evolution of war itself and the technical development of media to appearance of embedded journalism and social media have both been influencing factors. Fighting for better pictures and exclusivity, TV often provides superficial and incomplete information and background on certain issues. Print, due to its ability to offer more space and time for journalistic research, is for sure a good platform for being more conflict-sensitive than other media.

Peace journalism (PJ), or conflict-sensitive journalism, challenges journalists to play an active role in de-escalation and peaceful solution to conflict. This theoretical approach presents a possibility of an alternative, conflict-sensitive, framing of combat and crisis. This new approach might be viewed with skepticism among journalists as seeming too idealistic to follow. Journalism is a practical activity, and it seems to be a failure to develop theories that are not applicable. Thus, any theory needs to be verified in practice. Still there is a large body of research on media coverage of wars (its norms, objectives, challenges and implementation) but studies in the PJ field, particularly aiming to operationalize PJ, are rare. Full implementation of the theory is difficult to achieve, but it is a worthy endeavor for journalists to have viable necessary tools in order to be able to produce conflict-sensitive reporting and avoid the promotion of violence.

In order to verify the applicability of peace journalism as an essential way of foreign reporting on crisis and conflicts, this thesis analyzes and compares the coverage of US, UK and German media of the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. The research questions of this work are twofold: a) was this reporting conflict-sensitive and did it follow the central direction of this theory; b) if it was not conflict-sensitive, was the coverage balanced? The purpose of the study is to explore the difficulties of foreign conflict reporting and describe the relative new approach of peace journalism. In addition, the thesis uses a case study to illustrate a real life example of this new approach in practice pertaining to the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. Based on the findings of the study the author aims also to discuss applicability of peace journalism.

Methodology and limitation of the work:

This thesis consists of two main parts. The first part is a literature review and analysis of the previous work in this field. It will provide a critical review of present literature on foreign conflict reporting, peace journalism, balance and framing issues. The second part is an empirical study conducted with quantitative and qualitative content such as an analysis of print editions of six national newspapers from the US, the UK and Germany from August 2008. These articles all cover the Russia-Georgia war and its aftermath. Based on a code book, elaborated by the author of this thesis, it has been analyzed 125 articles, afterwards there have been comparisons made between the theoretical elaborations and concrete practical case of the Russia-Georgia war.

Due to temporal and scientific-economic limitations of the research, this paper is not going to examine all samples of journalistic works during the war, and it does not include an analysis of local media on the topic. Moreover, the thesis is restricted to a verbal analysis of print media. On no account is this research aiming to establish which way of reporting on that war was right or wrong, which version of events was the most correct, or to lay blame.

[…] Structure of the study:

The first chapter of the work introduces the topic, the motivation of the author, the aim of the study, its research questions, methodology and available studies on the Russia-Georgia war.

The second chapter explores the theoretical findings on the topic. It considers a combination of foreign and conflict reporting, and as a proposal for practitioners features of peace and war-oriented journalism, its strengths and weaknesses. Separately I have included a brief account on the topic of balance as a professional principle of journalistic work. This chapter raises the question of framing for reporting and gives some idea of possible intersections of the aforementioned aspects with other features referred to the topic of foreign conflict reporting.

The third chapter focuses on the particular case study. Here the original results of the study hypotheses results are presented.

In the fourth chapter, theoretical and empirical input are displayed together and compared. Based on this comparison, some reflections on the applicability of peace journalism are made. Moreover, the chapter underlines limitations of the study and suggests discussion for future research in the current field.

The fifth chapter draws conclusions.

Table of Contents:

Text Sample:

Chapter 2.2.6, Peace journalism and stages of conflict escalation:

The conflict coverage dynamics heavily depends on stages of conflict escalation development. Two scholars have been actively engaged in the examining of this aspect.

Kempf believes that first three (from nine available) stages of escalation dynamics of a conflict are difficult for media to recognize. So, as a rule, media hardly pays attention to a conflict on those pre-escalation, or pre-violence, stages. The explanation of the coming ‘too late” can be found in the predilection of media for negativism, i.e. if no enough violence happens, chances for a crisis to get space in media outlets are smallish and depend already on other news factors. In its turn PJ appeals to proactive reporting. Journalists pick up a topic when it obviously reaches a critical point, i.e. when violence occurs, tough discussions are lead or diplomatic struggles appear. Here journalists do not even ‘need to do research to become aware of the conflict: the conflict comes to them. It is few minutes before ‘high moon’. Now it is upon media whether to accept or ignore that challenge. As soon as military actions begin media coverage increases significantly and goes down when some kind of peace resolution is reached or violence is not so intense or manifest. Also the ‘media’ tiredness with topic can be caused by appearance of other breaking news.

PJ sees the media engaged at all three stages: before, during and after a conflict (or a war). Experience shows lots of difficulties for such approach, which, for example, roots in news value, in scare resources of media that cannot cover all multiplicity of conflicts and wars, in the perception of media as a reactive mean for reflection of the reality.

In addition Bläsi explores how features, facilitating and hindering peace journalism, are expressed according to the six following factors of production of coverage, such as: 1) journalistic system, 2) individual characteristics of the journalist, 3) lobbying, information management and propaganda, 4) situation on-site, 5) public climate, 6) the audience. The author analyzes the potentials of those aspects to operate at three stages: ‘(1) precondition of news production in nonviolent conflict, (2) preconditions of news production in violent conflict/in wartime, (3) preconditions of news production in the aftermath of violent conflicts.

Bläsi analyses at what moment the theory of peace journalism can be ideally implemented and how current journalistic realities, norms, structures, regulations and experiences assist or hamper that implementation. Besides, in wartime there is more space and more willingness but less time for journalists to report properly on military incidents. According to the researcher, exactly during that period, ‘de-escalation-oriented coverage is rarely to be observed… at least when one’s own country is actively involved’, although the audience are more prepared for such kind of reporting, due to some expertise on a conflict got from the beginning of clashes. Before a war PJ works better for an involved party, however, during a war - for non-directly involved countries. Afterwards chances for solution-oriented reporting increase even more, i.e. ‘the information management of conflict parties and the mainstream of public discourse now aim at de-escalation, trust building and reconciliation with the former enemy’. Where PJ has already been on ground before violent stage of conflict, there is more probability, though not automatically, that it would work during the next war.

Thus, Bläsi takes into consideration all three phases of reporting news production, news publication and news reception, but he seems to emphasize too high the importance of audience during those phases, by arguing that much depends on the level of preparedness of public to perceive ‘peaceful’ information.

However, it should be mentioned that cultural differences can also play a significant role in dynamics of conflict coverage (e.g. triggering intercultural misunderstandings or even new conflicts). Therefore, they need to be taken into consideration not less than news values or stages of conflict escalation.