El Cacao de Colombia: un análisis del estado de la productividad

Despite its good intention to incite people to settle their conflicts with peaceful means, peace journalism does not only cover peace stories. McGoldrick and Lynch (2000) emphasized that peace journalism does not just mean “reporting peace”. In essence, it entails the application of insights from peace and conflict studies – what is known about the conflict, its dynamics and potential for transformation- to the everyday jobs of editing and reporting news.

But the criticism of peace journalism is sharpest and most categorical amongst some journalists who call it a heretical abandonment of the integrity of journalism and its professional norms. David Loyn (2007) articulates that peace journalism is simply not the role of a journalist and is based on the flawed notion. The idea that reporters currently only look for the epicenter of violence or are somehow addicted to conflict is absurd, (BBC journalist David Loyn, and 2007:33).

According to Robert A. Hackett (2006), its proponent see it as an expression of, and/or improvement upon, the best practices of actually-existing journalism, as well as a means of ameliorating conflicts and opening up new opportunities for their peaceful resolution. Peace Journalists regard conventional international news coverage -- its typical emphasis on violence, conflict as a two-sided win/lose struggle, government and military sources, and "our" suffering versus "their" villainy -- as comprising War Journalism (Lynch and McGoldrick 2005).

Robert A. argues that Peace Journalism is an unwelcome departure from objectivity and towards a journalism of attachment; it mistakenly assumes powerful and linear media effects because it is a normative model, rooted in the discipline of peace research, that fails sufficiently

to take into account the constraints imposed by the actual dynamics of news production (including professional values and organizational imperatives), and hence, may have little to offer journalists in practice.

He suggests the development of genuinely multinational and internationalist media, able to address and engage audiences in different countries with programming that challenges ethnocentric narratives and provides multiple perspectives on conflict. To him Peace Journalism would be strengthened by national and global regimes of media governance that reinforced popular communication rights -- not only freedom of expression, but also access to the means of public communication.

Dukulizimana (2014) points out that, today, media practitioners claim to just report the facts‒which constitutes sometimes a problem or obstacle for peace journalism. According to Lynch ^McGoldrick (2000), today, many people know how to create facts for journalists to report. Most governments think of their actions and statements as part of a ‘media strategy’, which cannot be separated from the business of running their country’s affairs (Dukulizimana, 2014:53).

Peace scholars and peace researchers view media propaganda as another important obstacle of Peace Journalism. In war period, media play an important role, “misinformation” increases especially, because involved parties know what they gain if they manipulate media and use them as a propaganda tools, (Dukulizimana, 2014:53). Noelle-Neumann (1995) brings in the theory of the “Spiral of Silence” suggesting that most frequently, the process to create the idea of the enemy goes together with a social pressure (Martín Galán, 2014: 261). Noelle-Neumann’s approach suggests that the population is conditioned by the perception they have about the

general thought or trends of the mass and is afraid of suffering social contempt or rejection if they expressed a different opinion. This may have also been the challenge for some journalists and reporters during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi as almost all media were pro- governmental, working on the side of the so called majority-Hutus, a group whose extremists were perpetrating genocide.

Dukulizimana suggests that while covering stories, journalists can just report facts objectively using traditional principals, or simply get inspired by Peace Journalism theorists and report the story with the aim to contribute to peace, and sometime subjectively. However, scholars, academics and conflict researchers found out that some journalists do not cover conflicts responsibly because they lack some knowledge or do not understand the issues at stake (Betz, 2011: 3&Dukulizima 2014:53).

The problem Xavier Giró (2011) identified with peace journalism is that a series of vectors operate in the mass media, in terms of both the decision about whether to cover conflicts, and how it should be covered. He argues that the international hierarchy of countries and global information flows is intertwined with the economic and political nature of the media and the culture of news journalism (Xavier Giró, 2011:3). For example, it is still fresh in peoples’ minds how the international media ignored to cover the Genocide against Tutsi and rushed to cover the presidential elections in South Africa.

Giró brings in another factor that the coverage of international media often depends on the relationship their countries of origin have with the areas in conflicts. Most of the international media, for example, have correspondents in their former colonies. For example, the Spanish media prioritize Latin America and the French media do the same for the Maghreb and sub-

Saharan Africa (Giró, 2011:4). According to him, there are two opposing mechanisms to determine what news is. The first is to toe the line of the “flagship” media: CNN, the New York Times, etc. In so doing, there are plenty of stories about news editors who ask correspondents or special correspondents to produce stories based on what they have just seen or heard on CNN. The other approach, which is only apparently paradoxical, is to look at what the competition has done. If they have all done more or less the same thing, they confirm the correctness of each other’s approach; if one disagrees, they worry because they are off-message and thus the circle closes.

In the same line, he depicts two “battling fields” within the communicative strategy during conflicts: the military and the informative. The basic strategy in military conflicts is to misinform and mislead the counterpart (“the enemy”). This is part of the communicative strategies “in the frontline”. According to Teran Strand (2013), the communicative strategies are used to legitimize war operations while the images in the news are used to win the war on the home front as well as on the ground, making the spectators innocent victims to a flow of untruthful images and discourses. He further says it consists in gaining the public support for the use of military action.

An effective tool is the construction of an image of the threatening , demonized and dehumanized “enemy”, discourses of “Us against Them” “Good against Evil.” We are constantly being manipulated through the media. There is a constant framing of what information we are exposed to (Strand Teran, 2013:1).