Journalists can report factually and also avoid fuelling conflicts

When reporting conflicts such as the Cord street demonstrations and the Cord-IEBC-government war of words, professional journalists do not set out to reduce the conflict.

They are only interested in reporting the conflict as objectively as possible, that is, as accurately and impartially as they can.

Hence some of Wednesday’s headlines in the Daily Nation, Taifa Leo, The Standard, and The Star were predictably “Raila, Uhuru hold rival fetes as talks deal flops”, “Uhuru na Raila mambo bado”, “IEBC storm builds up”, and “Raila’s ultimatum to Uhuru: Name team to negotiating table in four days”.

The bigger the conflict or disagreement, the better the headline, from the professional journalist’s point of view.

Unfortunately, studies the world over have shown that in professional media coverage, the news is often biased towards violence and violent actors, so much so that the bias feeds the flames of the conflict.

The violent actors are given priority in coverage and what has been called “feedback loop” is created.

We saw how the feedback loop operated during the 2007/8 post-election violence. In one incident, a mob of demonstrators started sharpening pangas on the pavement with war-like cries as soon as a television camera was trained on them. And the cameraman became more enthusiastic.

This kind of news coverage is called war journalism, which gives more value and preference to reporting violent responses to conflict than to non-violent responses and voices.

War journalism tends to be biased towards reporting only the differences and disagreements between parties and ignores similarities, common interests, or the causes of the conflicts.

War journalism tends to treat the reporting of conflicts as a zero-sum game in which audiences are led to believe that, for example, Cord’s needs can only be met by Jubilee’s compromise or defeat. Or the other way round.

This journalistic dichotomous approach to news reporting featured in much of the reporting of Kenya’s post-election violence of 2007/8. 

And it is playing out now right in front of our eyes in the current crises involving Cord and the government over the IEBC issue.

In traditional (professional) news reporting, demonstrators or parties to a conflict use media coverage to advance their position or causes. 

THE ALTERNATIVE

Jake Lynch, a journalist and associate professor at the University of Sydney, says in his book Peace Journalism that traditional media coverage (war journalism) conditions the behaviour of demonstrators and violent actors.

Such media coverage often ignores non-violent and less vocal voices in favour of the violent actors.

Journalism scholars and practitioners such as Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick have come up with an alternative to war journalism.

It is called peace journalism which, while reporting the news fully and factually, corrects the bias of war journalism. Peace journalism is also known as conflict sensitive journalism, conflict resolution journalism, and constructive conflict coverage.

Following the post-election violence of 2007/8 and the widely shared view that the Kenyan media poured fuel on the conflict, I was assigned by the Danish International Media Support the responsibility of producing a Kenyan version of Ross Howard’s handbook titled Conflict Sensitive Journalism.

The assignment only required localising the examples given in Howard’s handbook. I comfortably retained the original universal truths contained in Howard’s handbook regarding the best practices in reporting conflicts.

The Kenyan version of the handbook is titled My Tribe is Journalism.

The handbook was published with the hope that it would serve as a useful guide to the conceptual basis for peace journalism and as a practical everyday tool for reporting conflicts such as the ones we are facing today. 

What is clear in the handbook is that good journalism is a constant process of not only informing citizens but also enabling them to seek solutions.

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