Pete’s blog

So last week we did war journalism, this week I will talk about the opposite – peace journalism. Just to recap, the six steps for effective war journalism (soon to be a best selling management technique book) are:
1) Identify your enemy
2) Polarise things into us and them
3) Ridicule and belittle your enemy
4) Dehumanise and vilify your enemy
5) Champion your own people/cause
6) Declare war

In theory, peace journalism should be the exact opposite, so in reverse order this would be:
6) Don’t declare war
5) This is a difficult one, since it is generally a good thing to champion your own people. The trick is to not make it arrogance. It is the difference between saying “We are the best in the world because we say so”, and “We are the best in the world, because everyone loves us and everyone else says so.” Rather than the arrogance of assuming that you are the best, it is the determination and resolve to be better.
4) Humanise the ‘enemy’. You see a lot of attempts at this in some news articles. This is when you have a ‘human interest’ story, about some poor Iraqi family that has been affected by the war. Also when they talk about so many woman and children were killed rather than so many soldier/militia were killed. Showing everyday people going about there lives, or in war situations showing how normal families are suffering and being affected (the effectiveness of this will be discussed shortly). Anything that evokes an emotional sympathetic response or our human side is what works here.
3) Champion or glorify the ‘enemy’. To continue the Australian theme – “Wow! Those Aussie really know how to play sport, look at how many they are good at. Those Aussie really have some fantastic weather.”
2) Show how similar your ‘enemy’ is to you. “Those Australians are just like us – they have barbeques while we have braais, they have the same sort of weather, they love cricket and rugby, they love the beach. My friend went to live in Australia and he loves it, he says it is just like home.”
1) Question why they are an enemy, ask why we are fighting them. “Why can’t we all just get along?” {grin}

The problem with peace journalism is that it never really makes it into newspapers. Point 4, humanisation is probably the biggest failure. Why? Desensitisation. After the 50th human interest story, about poor Ismael who lost a leg from a bomb, and the poor Smiths who lost their son, and poor Naidoo who’s shop got blown up, and poor Bruce who just wants to marry his Sheila and get on with life, and, and… Who cares!? Show me more stuff getting blown up! Yay, explosions! We don’t really want to see despair and poor, sad people, we want to see action and victory and hope and glory and all the good stuff. Africa has a major image problem in this regard – everyone has seen the picture of the poor starving Ethiopian kid and no-one cares any more.
On point 3, why should we glorify the Aussies? Once again, who cares!? The Aussies do enough self-glorification by themselves, why should we help them?
And on point 2, everybody needs somebody to hate, someone to ridicule and look down on. It makes us feel more superior than we probably are. Even from a positive perspective, friendly rivalry and competition can be a good thing.

So if peace journalism is such a waste effort that is destined to fail, why hasn’t war journalism and war itself overrun the world? Because true peace happens outside of the media, it happens by face to face interaction – and so is more powerful. Why haven’t we invaded Australia? Because you probably have a few mates that have gone to live there and you have probably met a few Aussies and gotten drunk with them. It is this sort of direct personal interaction that is so vitally important – it is hard to hate a country if one of your friends comes from that country. You know how similar your ‘enemy’ is to you, because you got drunk together and found something in common, you don’t need to champion them, because your ‘enemy’ told you all about his country when he was drunk, and you don’t need to humanise him, because there is nothing more human than being drunk with someone.

Maybe this is what America needs more of. A president that had actually been to another country before he became president would be a good start… But more world travel, more world awareness, more exchange programmes and more world sports (sorry America, baseball and American football are not world sports). The stereotype American can name all 50 states, but cannot find Africa on a map. How to change that? Convince an American that the rest of the world has something to offer them? Not easy!

One last thing that I will leave you to think about – I have spoken of war and peace journalism in terms of the news media, what about films and movies? How much war and peace journalism goes on there – and how much more effective is it?