Citizen, Public and Peace Journalisms: Towards the More Radical Human Rights Journalism Strand

Abstract

This chapter explores links between public journalism and citizen journalism on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these two notions and peace journalism (PJ) serve as counter-hegemonic models to mainstream journalism. The notions of public journalism and citizen journalism have generated debate among academics and journalists on two main fronts: first, which one is more credible in terms of reaching out to people marginalised by mainstream traditional journalism; and, second, which one presents patterns or styles of reporting that are more radically different from those of mainstream journalism? PJ advocates such as Galtung and Vincent (1992, 1996) and Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) have put the blame of misreporting and misrepresenting the world’s crises squarely at the doorstep of war journalism, which prioritises violence. This is the opposite of PJ, which advocates conflict prevention and resolution. However, PJ has met with some scathing criticisms regarding its limitations in scope. In this chapter I make the argument that human rights journalism (HRJ) unravels the limitations of the three models insofar as bottom-up journalism and journalism based on the human touch are concerned. The chapter is divided into two sections. First it deals with the limits of public journalism and citizen journalism and with HRJ as an alternative paradigm; second, it discusses the limits of PJ and HRJ as a complementary strand.