Beyond peace journalism: Reclassifying conflict narratives in the Israeli news media

This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, foc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of peace research Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 151 - 165
Main Authors Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Keren, Hanitzsch, Thomas, Nagar, Rotem
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications Ltd 01.03.2016
SAGE Publications
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Armed conflict
Broadcasting
Civil war
Classification
Cluster analysis
Conflict
Content analysis
Iran
Israel
Journalism
Mass media images
Mass media violence
Media coverage
Narratives
News media
Peace
Peacetime
Political conflict
Political violence
Victims
Violence
War reporting
We they distinction
Iran
news
peace journalism
narratives
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Summary:This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets–Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet—over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
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ISSN:0022-3433
1460-3578
DOI:10.1177/0022343315609091