Framing War and Peace Journalism on the Perspective of Talibanisation in Pakistan

Abstract

This paper aims at empirically testing John Galtung's model of peace journalism by analysing Talibanisation in Pakistan of the leading Pakistani newspapers. The Taliban consist of local tribesmen, students of religious seminaries and few foreigner-jihadis who are against the Pakistani government for its support in the war on terror and want the Islamic system in the areas under their control. The Taliban are alleged to have provided help to the Al-Qaeda leadership responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. The literature on war and peace journalism suggests that the modern media are a major concern to combatants, the public and media professionals, and have an insightful effect on calling attention to the conflict arena. Media coverage is integral to shaping the course of events in war and peace. Conflict reporting leads to accusations of bias from both sides (Galtung and Vincent 1992; Wolfsfeld, 2003; Lynch, 2005). Of the 427 stones of editorial pages in the specified newspapers, most of them frame war journalism than peace journalism. The mean story length of the overall coverage is also higher for war journalism. Compared to the Urdu press, the English press was dominantly war-oriented. The Taliban receive more unfavourable than favourable slant In the overall coverage. However, the unfavourable slant is found In the war-joumallsm stories. The four most prominent indicators of war-journalism frames are differences-oriented, elite-oriented, dichotomy of good guy and bad guy, and zero-sum-orlented. The four most salient indicators supporting peace-joumallsm frames are solution-oriented, people-oriented, causes and effects, and multi-party-oriented.