A DISCUSSION ON THE METHODOLOGY OF PEACE JOURNALISM

Year 2017, Volume: 7 Issue: 4, 556 - 565, 01.10.2017

Ayça Demet Atay

https://doi.org/10.7456/10704100/003

Cited By: 2

Abstract

Peace journalism is a normative mode of journalism
that aims to contribute to nonviolent transformation of conflicts. The theory,
which supports that news about conflict should be given in a way to enhance
empathy and understanding among adversaries, is referred to as a revolutionary
or insurgent form of journalism by various sources. Peace journalism had an
ambiguous start regarding its methodology, which seems to be related to the
movement’s pragmatic take-off in the late 1990’s, and did not discuss its methodology
until the mid-2000’s. Later Jake Lynch (2006, 2007, 2014) proposed critical
realism as the methodological foundation of the movement. This paper discusses
the methodology problem of peace journalism and suggests instead a
constructionist methodology, which is based on the premise that there is no
truth independent of the observer; rather everything we know about the world is socially constructed. Critical realism
prioritizes ontology over epistemology and argues that there is a certain shape
of reality that one has to believe in. This paper argues that this
transcendental ontology is a form of story-telling and there are thousands of
ways of telling a story. Therefore, the priority for journalism should be on
epistemology, that is to say, on the question of “how to know” as news is a
representation of reality, and not a reflection of it. 

Keywords

Peace journalism, methodology, critical realism, constructionism, epistemology

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