Peace Journalism

CPACS is the world’s leading centre for research and teaching in the emerging field of Peace Journalism.

• What is it?
• Teaching
• Research
• Reporting the World
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Peace Journalism is when editors and reporters make choices - of what stories to report, and how to report them - which create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.

It uses conflict analysis and transformation to update the concepts of balance, fairness and accuracy in reporting.

The Peace Journalism approach provides a new road map tracing the connections between journalists, their sources, the stories they cover and the consequences of their reporting - the ethics of journalistic intervention.

It applies an awareness of non-violence and creativity to the practical job of everyday reporting.

(From Peace Journalism, by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, published by Hawthorn Press, Stroud, UK, 2005).

• Listen to CPACS Director, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, explaining peace journalism, in an interview for The Fourth Estate, a program on Sydney radio station, 2SER
• Jake Lynch spells out what peace journalism would mean in reporting of the conflict in Afghanistan, for the ‘Unleashed’ series on the ABC website
• Watch Peace Journalism in the Philippines, a forty-minute video documentary, by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick
• Watch News from the Holy Land: One Event. Two Stories. Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick illustrate how versions of events are distorted when reported from different viewpoints.

Peace journalism is the ‘big idea’ in one of the Arts Faculty’s most popular courses, Conflict-resolving Media, PACS 6914, which is taught several times a year by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick.

Joining students of Peace and Conflict Studies are those from other departments and institutions, including the Media Practice and Cultural Communication programs offered by Sydney University, along with journalism students from the University of Technology, and more. In the Summer School, there is the opportunity to share with, and learn from, senior public servants from the Australia-New Zealand School of Government, three of whom take the course each year.

Lynch and McGoldrick draw on their long experience of reporting on conflict, illustrated by their own original classroom materials, and of running professional training courses for editors and reporters in many countries including Indonesia, The Philippines, Nepal, Israel and Palestine, Georgia and Armenia.

Students have a go at re-writing the story of a bombing, as peace journalism, then record their own television interview, as Lynch subjects them to best BBC interviewing techniques! The course is suitable for anyone who is interested in media and their role in conflict and peace, actual and potential.

• Jake Lynch discusses some of the experiences of the course in a paper for the refereed e-journal, Conflict and Communication Online. Download PDF >
• Jake Lynch reflects on covering conflict in The Philippines, in a column for The Australian newspaper. View article >
• Lynch and McGoldrick recount the adventures of a group of Indonesian journalists on one of their training courses. View article >

Peace journalism is rapidly becoming a topic of interest to academic researchers around the world. A fund of practical options for journalists covering conflict, it is also a set of dividing lines on which war and peace reporting can be measured to suggest how warlike – or how peaceful – it is.

Jake Lynch applied peace journalism as a set of ‘evaluative criteria’ to UK press coverage of Iran’s alleged ‘nuclear ambitions’, for the Global Media Journal. Download PDF >

The e-journal, Conflict and Communication Online, has taken the lead in publishing refereed research papers by scholars using and debating peace journalism. You can browse freely at www.cco.regener-online.de/

Volume 6, Number 2 is titled, ‘The Peace Journalism Controversy’, with contributions from two leading critics – one a professional journalist, the other an academic – and replies from Jake Lynch and a fellow defender of peace journalism, along with a synthesis by the journal’s editor. In an authoritative yet accessible article, Lynch takes on philosophical and practical debates over peace journalism. Download PDF >

Further research is presented at conferences of the International Peace Research Association, which now has its own Peace Journalism Commission, with Jake Lynch as the convenor.

Growing numbers of CPACS students are now working on their own research projects on or inspired by peace journalism, both for their dissertations on the MPACS program and in pursuit of higher research degrees.

Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick presented the ideas of peace journalism to professional journalists in British media, in the Reporting the World project, from 2001-2005. The project website features the transcripts of editors and reporters discussing issues in coverage of the ‘war on terrorism’, Iraq and conflicts in South-East Europe, Africa, Indonesia and the Middle East.

Visit the Reporting the World website

Photo: Indonesian journalists doing peace journalism, part of a training course run by CPACS Director, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, and lecturer Annabel McGoldrick.

The Point of Peace Summit

Below is a video recording of Associate Professor Jake Lynch's speech at the Point of Peace Summit in Stavanger, Norway, September 12 2008.

Links to external website (youtube.com):
Jake Lynch’s presentation to the Point of Peace Summit Part 1