The Presentation of Alternative Ways of Settling the Gulf Conflict in German, Norwegian and Finnish Media

The current discussion among journalists and scholars in media research and peace studies focuses on the question of how the media can become vehicles for conf1ict prevention and constructive, nonviolent conflict transformation. This proposal of critical peace journalism as an alternative to traditional war reporting is not suggesting that violence should not be reported or that what is reported as facts should not be empirically correct. However, it emphasizes the point that the form in which conflict is reported may contribute either to the escalation or to the de-escalation of the conflict. Escalating cont1icts entail systematic distortions of how the parties in the conflict view themselves, their opponents and impartial third parties who try to mediate in the conflict, and of how the parties evaluate their goals and actions ete. (Kempf, 1996b). The more a society is involved in a conflict, the more will its public and its media be susceptible to such distortions. Even propaganda does not just invent some sort of propagandistic view of the conflict but rather takes up and fosters those natural processes. Therefore, if a piece of journalism looks like propaganda, this does not necessarily mean that it was systematically constructed for propagandistic purposes. It may appear propagandistic simply because the journalist responsible for it became the victim of a heated public atmosphere. Critical peace journalism therefore has to take such processes into account in order to break the propaganda trap. In his book The Ancient Foe (986), Luostarinen developed a model of war propaganda according to which both restrictive and supportive methods of information control are used in propaganda in order to get people to strongly and personally identify themselves with the goals of war. Restrictive methods try to minimize all information which could cause negative effects on the fighting spirit, while supportive methods try to maximize all information with a positive effect. According to Ltlostarinen, this latter goal is handled by fabrication, selection and exaggeration of information.