|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
   |
|
|
 |
|
||
|
Virtual
Diplomacy Homepage >> Virtual
Diplomacy Publications >> The
Media's Role in Preventing and Moderating Conflict 
The Media's Role in Preventing and Moderating Conflict by Robert Karl Manoff Our century has been characterized by organized group
violence on an extraordinary scale. The figures are slippery, but it
is safe to say that the human race has seen fit to engage in something
like 250 significant armed conflicts in the course of this century,
during which over 110 million people have been killed, and many times
that number wounded, crippled, and mutilated. The scale of this slaughter is something new in human
history. Only 19 million people died in the 211 major conflicts of the
Nineteenth Century; 7 million were killed in the Eighteenth, which was
marked by a mere 55 significant wars. In fact, there have probably been
as many casualties from mass violence in our century as in the rest
of human history combined. We have become sufficiently used to these numbers and
the human suffering they represent that we forget how much more social
violence we live with than did our ancestors, and how much more deadly
it has become. Indeed, mass violence on a previously unimaginable scale
has become universalized, industrialized, and routinized. Ours is the
age of "ammunition affluence," in the words of John Keegan, the military
historian, who noted in the midst of the Lebanese civil war that a typical
small building in Beirut carried two or three thousand bullet holes.
Large structures might have been hit up to two or three million times.
"This is not just the nuclear age," he wrote. "It is also the age that
has made ammunition junk, a throwaway commodity, like popcorn or wedding
rice." According to Ted Robert Gurr, who has done the most ambitious
data gathering, every form of ethnopolitical conflict has increased
dramatically since the 1950's: violent communal protests and open rebellion
are both four times what they were a half century ago. Social violence,
in other words, is now more likely to occur than at any other time in
human history, and to be devastating in its consequences when it does
so. With this in mind, and for realpolitik, humanitarian,
and moral reasons, we cannot avoid asking ourselves what more can be
done in the common interest to reduce and prevent such conflict and
the suffering that attends it, with this proposition, few would disagree.
But why invoke the media in this context? Because it is clear that,
taken together, mass media technologies, institutions, professionals,
norms and practices constitute one of the fundamental forces now shaping
the lives of individuals and the fate of peoples and nations. To be
sure, media influence is not evenly distributed in space or time and
varies with circumstance. But, overall, media influence is significant,
and increasingly so, and as a result the media constitute a major human
resource whose potential to help prevent and moderate social violence
begs to be discussed, evaluated, and, where appropriate, mobilized. Over the past several years the NYU Center for War, Peace,
and the News Media has been developing a program to explore related
issues. In the course of doing so, we have begun to inventory media-based
initiatives that have already been undertaken to minimize conflict or
promote other prosocial ends. We are interested in journalism, but also
in soap operas, public affairs programming, sitcoms, advertising, public-interest
public relations, and social marketing. We are also exploring what governments
can do through the policy process to promote the utilization of media
resources for preventive purposes; and we are curious about how (through
such prosaic means as professional exchanges and international fellowships)
journalists and media professionals can enhance their own understanding
of the potential of their medium and the obligations (if any) that derive
from them. The Center has an inventory of 100 initiatives, but given
the scale of intergroup conflict, the complexities of the issues that
underlie it, and the power of the mass media, these initiatives represent
a tiny fraction of what potentially could be brought to bear if there
were the interest and the will to do so. As arresting as some of them may be individually, these
initiatives represent a largely intuitive response to the challenge
posed by conflict, based on little or no analysis of the media's potential
roles or their actual capabilities, and produced on an ad hoc basis
by a diverse and changing constellation of private enterprises, NGOs,
governmental agencies, and multilateral institutions which communicate
little and have had few opportunities to learn from one another. Nevertheless, there are underlying strategies at work
in each of these cases, and it may be worth tickling out some of them
briefly prior to sampling a more systematic and comprehensive agenda
for the media to pursue in situations where conflict looms or has already
occurred. "Capitol to Capitol," for example, the live, interactive
broadcast between lawmakers in Washington and Moscow that was aired
in 1986, a time of considerable superpower tension. "Capitol-to-Capitol"
was notable for the way it placed leaders from the two countries in
direct touch with each other in a non-confrontational setting, allowing
them to respond as individuals and to experience their opposite numbers
as individuals. By virtue of witnessing this humanizing exchange, the
large audiences in each country were, like their leaders, expected to
understand more about their country's adversaries and presumably come
away from the spectacle both better informed and less antagonistic. Something like this is also at work in the "Ism Project,"
which is making small video cameras available to college students to
enable them to express their own perspectives on the intergroup conflicts
often roiling their campuses. The personal "video diaries" that result
will be broadcast to wider audiences, which is where the parallel to
the spacebridge occurs. But the strategy of the video diary differs
from that of the spacebridge in two respects. First, it involves grassroots
participants in an active role and not merely as spectators. Second,
the video diary has what might be called an "expressive dimension" that
involves the projection of feelings and emotions not engaged in the
formal discursive format of the spacebridge. The video diary, then,
is presumed to have a therapeutic dimension for those directly taking
part, who can express feelings of denial or frustration that can contribute
to the exacerbation of intergroup conflict. Moreover, this is something
that the viewer of the edited, broadcast version senses, which arguably
makes such a viewer's secondary experience all the more powerful. Contrast both of these initiatives to "Radio Boat," which
operated according to an entirely different strategic model. An initiative
of a European NGO undertaken with financing from the European Union,
Radio Boat was stationed in the Adriatic in 1993-1994, where it attempted
to counteract the xenophobic propaganda being circulated in the former
Yugoslavia with objective news and public affairs programming. Judged
unsuccessful for a number of reasons (among them: the ship's signal
couldn't be heard on the other side of the mountains that line the coast),
Radio Boat nevertheless applied another, basically journalistic, approach
to preventing conflict, counteracting assumedly false and incendiary
information with what was deemed to be the "truth." This was a dramatically different strategy from that being
pursued by the Voice of America, whose radio series was also grouped
under the "programming" rubric above, because VOA has determined that
understanding the phenomenon of conflict and the conflict resolution
process itself (rather than the facts of any particular case) can help
its listeners manage individual and intergroup conflicts to which they
may be a party. Both Radio Boat and VOA are pursuing information strategies,
in other words, but the former attempted, to put it crudely, to counteract
lies with the truth, while the latter is educating listeners to a process
that will enable them to seek out truth about their antagonists or at
least question lies about them on their own. Aspects of several of the above initiatives have been
combined in the Center's own project in the Former Yugoslav Republic
of Macedonia. The Center was asked to design a pilot program for journalists
that could help to minimize interethnic tension. We developed the "Inter-Ethnic
Team Reporting Project" to bring together journalists from different
ethnic news organizations (all news organizations there are de facto
ethnic news organizations) to work together on stories concerning the
country as a whole that were then published in identical form in each
of the newspapers. The project proved to be a powerful experience for
the journalists involved, none of whom had ever worked with their ethnic
opposite numbers, and for their editors and fellow reporters. More important,
the readers of the stories were exposed to material that took the "imagined
community" of their common country as the important unit, instead of
the ethnic communities of which it was composed. Finally, several of the initiatives involved the media
in some form of mediation between parties, a form of direct intervention
that is practiced surprisingly often by the media but which is controversial
among journalists when their attention is drawn to the practice, even
though they may be engaged in it. For example, Walter Cronkite's on-the-air
negotiation between Sadat and Begin led to the breakthrough trip by
Sadat to Israel. Upon Nelson's Mandela's release from prison, Ted Koppel
hosted a "Nightline" during which the newsman mediated between the newly
free black leader and the prime minister of South Africa. Ted Koppel mediated between whole communities in the Middle
East, in a process in which his newsman's persona clearly establishes
his authority to be undertaking his audacious mission. His goal here
is the same as that of a mediator: to achieve agreement between contending
parties. This was also the goal of the "video dialogue" broadcast
on "Peace Cafe," but in this case the parties to the communal conflict
in the community of Crossroads, South Africa, were not even willing
to come to the table themselves. Members of both groups spoke independently
to the cameras, and edited versions of each group's case were shown
to the other group in a process that eventually spiraled into direct
engagement of the parties through the mediating power of the video image. For its part, the Akron Beacon Journal's Race Relations
Project first undertook some striking reporting of racial issues in
the city, using computer-assisted reporting techniques to provide arresting
new information on the situation of the races in Akron to help explain
the experience of Blacks and Whites to each other. In and of itself,
such reporting fulfills certain conflict management roles by providing
information to the parties. However, the paper took further extraordinary
steps: It solicited the participation of community groups around the
city in the process of reducing racial tension, organized meetings,
collected 22,000 citizen pledges to work for racial harmony, and even
hired professional facilitators to work with the 100 community groups
it selected to carry on the work begun by the series. It is striking
to note that the newspaper's actions in clearly overstepping the profession's
nominal models of journalistic detachment were rewarded with a Pulitzer
Prize. To understand the significance of these initiatives we
need to begin to unpack the role that they have played in a complex
process of conflict prevention and management. These brief descriptions
merely scratch the surface of what such an analysis might reveal inasmuch
as the process of conflict intervention involves a complex set of psychological,
social, political, and economic factors. The point I would like to underline today is that nowhere
in the media, diplomatic, or NGO communities is there now a clear, systematic
sense of precisely what strategies ought to be pursued with what media
means, or to what ends, in which kinds of conflict situations. These
initiatives are undertaken for a wide variety of reasons, some of which
are not even primarily those of conflict prevention. They are also undertaken
with varying degrees of sophistication regarding both the process of
conflict prevention and the potential of media-based initiatives. In an effort to work toward understanding such issues,
the Center has been developing a typology of the roles that the media
could potentially play, drawing on conflict management theories of various
stripes, negotiating theory in the diplomatic context, and on a wide
range of other approaches to the prevention and management of conflict
at the international and sub-state level. Such a typology is the starting
point for the consideration of potential media roles, a way of thinking
our way into the question, "What media-based initiatives would it be
possible and appropriate to undertake in particular conflict situations?"
In order to provide a flavor of how this work might proceed, a preview
of potential and existing media roles follows. I should emphasize again
that we are talking about all forms of media-related activity in any
medium, at the local, national, international or transnational levels.
The media could:
This is but a partial account of potential media roles.
A fuller account would describe a complex set of activities undertaken
by a great variety of factors operating from institutional bases in
independent, multilateral, and governmental institutions in conflict
situations of great diversity. Elaborating such a full account will
require, over time, the combined efforts of media professionals, diplomats,
conflict resolvers and diverse protagonists, among others. The process by which this could done would be one of "social
invention" in which the spontaneous, largely uncoordinated, but not
random activities of diverse actors could create new institutions and
behaviors. Journalism itself, in fact, is a product of precisely this
process over time, as is the sitcom, soap opera, rap song, the portable
radio and the Op-Ed page. It would be folly to believe that the history
of the media has ended here, and that should a need be identified there
does not exist the social imagination to meet it. About the Author: Robert Karl Manoffis
the Director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New
York University. This essay draws on work being undertaken under a grant
from the United States Institute of Peace and is based on a presentation
to the Colloquium on Science, Technology, and Government at New York
University.
The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate particular policies. This paper was prepared for the Virtual Diplomacyconference hosted by United States Institute of Peacein Washington, D.C. on April 1 and 2, 1997.
Home | Jobs | FAQs | Contact Us | Directions | Privacy Policy | Site Map United States Institute of Peace -- 1200 17th Street NW -- Washington, DC 20036
|