GMJ: Mediterranean Edition 1(1) Spring 2006 74 What’s so great about Peace Journalism? By Jake Lynch Abstract This paper uses the Peace Journalism model, devised by Johan Galtung and developed by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, and others, to carry out an empirical content analysis on coverage by UK newspapers of the ‘Iran nuclear crisis’ over five months from August, 2005. The survey of 211 articles concentrates on one aspect of Peace Journalism: namely, where they present the causes and ‘exits’ or ‘outcomes’ of the conflict as being located – in Iran, the conflict arena, in the present and immediate future; or across a broader conflict formation, open in time and space. The former, it is argued, is characteristic of propaganda likely to provide justification for a violent response, and, therefore, a staple of War Journalism. The latter approach reinstates some of the elements omitted from propagandistic representations, and is likely to redress the balance of incentive towards non- violent responses. It is also, the paper argues, more accurate, when measured against what is known and has been observed about conflict by researchers who have studied it, in the overlapping fields of Conflict Analysis and Peace Research. Content analyses of UK press have often sought evidence to confirm the general left/right political orientation of individual publications. Mapping their representations of this story on to Peace Journalism criteria produces quite different results. The left- of-centre Guardian, for instance, comes out as markedly more War Journalistic - more likely to reproduce dominant readings of war propaganda - than some of its rivals. The right-wing Spectator shows a far higher proportion of Peace Journalism than its left-wing counterpart, the New Statesman. Peace Journalism, it is argued, produces findings of material relevance to both the operation of conflict reporting and its likely influence on source behaviour, in a feedback loop of cause and effect, as well as highlighting appropriate steps editors and reporters could take to ensure accuracy and balance in their coverage. Critical realism Peace Journalism is a critical realist theory about the reporting of conflict. Critical realism has been described by Wright (1996) as: A way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’) (pp. 35-36). On a critical realist view, therefore, news should still be seen as a representation of something other than itself - a ‘report of the facts’, even though those facts are, in nearly every case, ready- mediated by the time any journalist, let alone readers and audiences, comes into contact with them. There are, it is argued (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005), inevitably more facts than can be fitted into the reports, even in media that have expanded rapidly in range, scope and size over recent years. So, in considering the nature of dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known, it is the criteria on which choices, or ‘gate keeping decisions’ are made – as to which facts to include, and which to leave out - that are the salient issues. This salience arises, in turn, from time-honored expectations of journalism as a civic tool in democracy, providing “a reliable account of what is really going on” (p. xv) to enable informed participation and consent, legitimizing the exercise of political and other forms of authority in the public sphere. These expectations are built in to many formulations around the world of public service principles, for instance. Their aim, according to the most influential of these - the BBC Producer Guidelines – is to equip audiences with “an intelligent and informed account of issues that enables them to form their own views” (p. 223).