Constructing Peace with Media: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Global News Trends

Abstract

Wejuxtaposed war and peace journalism, based on Galtung’s classification, to examine how leading providers of international news—the BBC World, CNN International, Al-Jazeera English and Press TV are responding to the call for a shift from war to peace agenda in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We coded for occurrences, approaches and language-use to determine the salient indicators of war and peace journalism. Overall, our finding shows a significant support forGaltung’s description of war journalism compared to peace journalism. We concluded that peace journalism in global news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at present is more engendered by events of the peace process and we-are-peace-loving propaganda than conscious editorial drive towards peace. The notable presence of indicators of peace journalism offers a reason to believe that media are able to shape peace in Israel/Palestine through a more conscious application of peace journalism model, but also calls for concern on how bias might be represented in peace journalism.