The search for common ground in conflict news research: Comparing the coverage of six current conflicts in domestic and international media over time

Abstract

In its search for media influences in violent conflict, most existing scholarship has investigated the coverage of specific, salient conflict events. Media have been shown to focus on violence, sidelining concerns of reconciliation and disengaging rapidly as time proceeds. Studies have documented ethnocentric bias and self-reinforcing media hypes, which have been linked to escalation and radicalization. However, based on the existing studies, it remains hard to gauge if the unearthed patterns of media coverage are generally pervasive or limited to a few salient moments, specific conflicts or contexts. Likewise, we cannot say if different kinds of media apply similar styles of conflict coverage, or if their coverage is subject to specific contextual or outlet-specific factors. In this article, the authors compare the contents of both domestic and foreign opinion-leading media coverage across six selected conflicts over a time range of 4 to 10 years. They conduct a diachronic, comparative analysis of 3,700 semantic concepts raised in almost 900,000 news texts from 66 different news media. Based on this analysis, they trace when and to what extent each outlet focuses its attention on the conflict, highlights specific aspects (notably, violence and suffering, negotiations and peaceful solutions), and presents relevant in- and out-groups, applying different kinds of evaluation. The analysis generally corroborates the media’s tendency to cover conflict in an event-oriented, violence-focused and ethnocentric manner, both during routine periods and – exacerbated merely by degrees – during major escalation. At the same time, the analysis highlights important differences in the strength and appearance of these patterns, and points to recurrent contingencies that can be tied to the specific contextual factors and general journalistic logics shaping the coverage.

Convergent News? A Longitudinal Study of Similarity and Dissimilarity in the Domestic and Global Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“…Finally, news coverage of conflicts, and the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict in particular, is characterized by several features that are less pronounced in other contexts (Baden & Tenenboim‐Weinblatt, forthcoming, 2017). Notably, both the polarized nature of the conflict and the presence of long‐established cultural news narratives increase pressures toward domestication, thereby impeding convergence.…”

Navigating the complexities of media roles in conflict: The INFOCORE approach

“…The contribution by Baden and Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2017) provides us with nuanced data from these different conflicts to confirm that ' [m]uch media attention is narrowly focused around salient events, oriented toward reporting violence rather than peace-related news, and wanes as violence drags on'. Indeed, they find that media coverage is not strongly related to actual changes in the level of violence except for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and while media do pay more attention to periods of initial escalation or large scale violent events as in the case of Syria, they find only 'weak evidence of escalation induced changes, particularly in domestic news coverage'.…”

Encuadres mediáticos del Perdón y Reconciliación en el contexto del conflicto armado colombiano

“…En primer lugar, el discurso mediático se relaciona con un proceso de influencia contextodiscurso, en el que la prominencia de creencias del edc en el discurso mediático es dependiente del contexto de la violencia. Así, las etapas de escalamiento de la violencia propician un discurso mediático que reproduce el edc casi en su totalidad (Baden & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2018;Elbaz & Bar-Tal, 2016;Khan, 1998;Mandelzis, 2007;Oren, 2016;Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Hanitzsch, & Nagar, 2016). Por el contrario, etapas de desescalada del conflicto propician un cambio en el edc reproducido por los medios, lo que se ve reflejado en la gradual pérdida de prominencia de las creencias sociales que sostienen el conflicto (Benziman, 2014a;2014b;Lee, 2010;Oren, 2009;Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al, 2016).…”