ABSTRACT

Peace journalism (PJ) is a framework intended to improve conflict coverage by challenging traditional news values. Our study aimed to compare the use of PJ in the local and foreign coverage of two key violent events in Kenyan history—the 2017 election violence and the 2019 Dusit attack—as well as collecting reporters’ views and understandings of the concept. A content analysis of 257 articles across 10 legacy newspapers from Kenya, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa was supplemented with 14 semi-structued interviews with local and foreign reporters. We found war journalism (WJ) to be the prevailing frame, with no significant difference in the use of PJ between Kenyan and international newspapers apart from a few variations across individual indicators. The interviews exposed a lack of awareness of PJ in the case of foreign correspondents, and an interpretation that fundamentally differs from traditional understandings of the concept in the case of Kenyan reporters. We conclude that PJ is not a one-size-fits-all approach and needs to be embraced and transformed in cooperation between journalists and academics before it can become a reality in mainstream newsrooms.

摘要

和平新闻（PJ）是一个旨在通过挑战传统新闻价值观来改善冲突报道的框架。我们的研究旨在比较 PJ 在本地和国外报道肯尼亚历史上的两个关键暴力事件（2017 年选举暴力和 2019 年都喜袭击事件）中的使用情况，并收集记者对该概念的看法和理解。对来自肯尼亚、美国、英国和南非的 10 份传统报纸的 257 篇文章进行了内容分析，并对当地和外国记者进行了 14 次半结构化采访。我们发现战争新闻（WJ）是主流框架，肯尼亚和国际报纸在使用 PJ 方面没有显着差异，除了个别指标存在一些差异。采访暴露了外国记者对 PJ 缺乏认识，以及肯尼亚记者对这一概念的传统理解根本不同的解释。我们得出的结论是，PJ 不是一种万能的方法，需要在记者和学者之间的合作中接受和转变，然后才能在主流新闻编辑室中成为现实。