Reframing South African TV news as peace journalism

Abstract

This article presents an indicative sample from the results of an experiment that gatheredaudience responses to television news that was coded as “war journalism” and “peacejournalism” respectively, in South Africa, during April 2012. From the peace journalism model,evaluative criteria were derived under a set of five headings for content analysis of two televisionnews programmes and four newspapers. Distinctions under the headings were particularisedfor individual stories by critical discourse analysis to disclose potential sources of influencetransmitted into audience frames. The test material was then coded to fall within the upper andlower peace journalism quartiles of the ‘idiom and range’ of journalism, as currently practised,demonstrated by the content analysis. Transcripts of discussions by focus groups who saw thematerial, as well as written notes made whilst viewing by a larger sample of participants, werethemed according to Entman’s model of framing (1993), where causal interpretation is linked totreatment recommendation. From these interim findings, peace journalism proved to be ideationalin the sense that peace journalism viewers were more likely to perceive structural and/or systemicexplanations for problems, and more likely to see opportunities for therapeutic and/or cooperativeremedies to be applied through exertions of political agency from different levels.