Introduction

This interdisciplinary article weaves together journalistic practice with psychological testing to explore whether ideas about the framing of news to contribute to peace actually make any difference to consumers, both cognitively and emotionally. Hence, the first half considers the historical background in the Philippines that has shaped how news producers and consumers make meaning. Rather than running a laboratory-based study, researchers worked in the field, in the TV newsroom of Davao-based ABS-CBN, utilizing material already broadcast. This material could be defined as “war journalism,” thus enabling it to be reframed as “peace journalism.”

Lynch and McGoldrick (2005, 5) define .peace journalism to be “when editors and reporters make choices—of what stories to report, and how to report them—which create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.” Peace journalism was developed from the original schema by Johan Galtung (in Lynch and McGoldrick 2005, 6) that differentiates it from war journalism, as seen below:

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The alternative framings were then tested on audiences using a variety if qualitative and quantitative techniques to elicit cognitive and emotional responses.

The Philippines Discourse

The Philippines got its name in the sixteenth century when Spanish conquistadores under King Philip established a settlement and embarked on more than three centuries of colonial rule. The unified country was then sold to the United States (US) as part of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War in 1898. Filipinos rose in rebellion against the Americans, but the uprising was finally quelled, with great loss of life, before the outbreak in Europe of World War I.

The US remained the colonial power until after World War II when the Philippines attained independence, but the country soon emerged as a key Cold War ally, signing a security pact with Washington in 1951. Nearly twenty years later, during the war in neighboring Vietnam, a significant Communist insurgency flared. With US backing, then President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972. Marcos was deposed by a people power revolution in 1986, and the new government under President Corazon Aquino closed down the US military bases and opened peace negotiations with the Communists.

Later, Washington regained influence through military cooperation in the so-called war on terrorism, with the country’s second female president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, declaring all-out war in 2006 on the New People’s Army (NPA), the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). By the time of the experiment described in this article, in early 2011, this cycle had apparently turned round again, with Benign() Aquino III, Corazon’s son, now ensconced in Malacañang, and peace talks with the CPP-NPA once more on the government agenda.

Media had often played a significant role in these developments. Coronel (2000, 149) emphasizes the “legacy of a century-long tradition of a fighting, anti-colonial press.” Through the twentieth century, “clandestinely distributed newspapers helped raise awareness of the evils of nearly 400 years of colonial rule, germinating the idea of an independent Philippine nation” (Coronel 2000, 149-150).

Towards the end of the Marcos dictatorship, a new newspaper was founded—the Philippine Daily Inquirer or PDI—with the explicit aim of hastening the end of martial law. In the early weeks of 1986, it ran a series of high-profile investigative articles which, according to Coronel (2000, 147-148), exposed

…the massive cheating which Marcos had engineered in national elections, provoking widespread anger and stoking discontent… The fall of President Marcos, in February 1986, was not just a sensational story. The local Filipino media played a key role in the political confrontation and—it could be argued—tipped the scales in favor of the pro-democracy movement.

Media also formed a key arena for contestation as the war on terrorism template was imported by the Arroyo Administration and applied to the conflict with the NPA. The “signature propaganda ploy for the war on terrorism” (Lynch 2008) is to “decontextualize” political violence by nonstate actors, leaving readers and audiences to infer instead that any such incident arises from what the novelist Gore Vidal called “motiveless malignity” (Lynch, 2008).

In contrast, the Human Security Law belatedly adopted in 2007 by the Philippine Congress refers to “taking into account the root causes of terrorism without acknowledging these as justifications for terrorist and/or criminal activities.” Remedies included equitable economic development: a reference open to interpretation as sympathetic to at least some portions of the CPP analysis that the Philippines is in need of radical reform and a rebalancing of society in favor of its poorer members.

Applying evaluative criteria based on the peace journalism model, Lynch (2008) found this conflict over the representation of political violence, its causes, and appropriate responses to be manifest in media coverage at the time. In Galtung’s -(1998) original table, the characteristics of peace journalism appear on the right hand side; those of “war/violence journalism” on the left. The latter presents conflicts as a zero-sum game, with two parties contesting the single goal of victory: closed space, closed time, causes and exits in arena. In contrast, the former allows for open space, open time, (with) causes and exits anywhere. It means there is a preference for “non-violent, developmental responses to conflict” (Lynch and McGoldrick 2005, 5). Lynch and Galtung (2010, 15) comment:

The position taken here is not that good reporting on conflict is some kind of compromise with a little from the left hand column and a little from the right. The position taken is in favor of the second column, peace journalism, and against war journalism.

Shinar (2007) characterizes peace journalism as including backgrounds and contexts in the reporting of events in conflict. Hence, Lynch (2008) says, the extent of peace journalism in Philippine media on this particular point “indicate(s) the relative political traction of the `war on terrorism, on the one hand, and approaches based on conflict management, peace building and equitable economic development, on the other” when deciding on appropriate responses to the NPA conflict (Lynch 2008, 147).

Lynch found a high quotient of peace journalism in Philippine media in their coverage following Arroyo’s declaration of war in 2006, compared with coverage in international media. It is an important clue as to the intertextual influences on the meanings any Philippine audience is likely to make in response to further iterations of the same story. In this research, therefore, we are using a discourse historical approach (Wodak 2001) to critical discourse analysis (CDA).

Fairclough and Wodak (1997, 258) define CDA to propose

…a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s) which frame it: the discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them. That is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned.

The discourse revealed in Philippines media is both conditioned by, and helps to construct, the country’s responses to conflict, with peace journalism already established in at least one of its key characteristics, as identifying a key ideational distinction in representations of the conflict with the NPA.

Separate studies reveal a similar discursive structure underpinning representations of the other long-running insurgency in the Philippines, concentrated in the south of the country by Moro groups, notably the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF); themselves the subject of declarations of all-out war by past presidents, but now on ceasefire as peace talks continue. Here, too, the key ideational distinction is to acknowledge background and context, locating underlying contradictions in the conflict in issues of social justice. In their history of the Mindanao conflict, Vitug and Gloria (2000, 112) comment that

Underneath this Islamic veneer is the stark reality that fuels the Muslim rebellion in Mindanao: economic and social exclusion… Ordinary people… join the MILF driven by need. They turn to violence for a solution to their economic and social problems.

Content Analysis

Lynch’s 2008 study supports earlier findings, such as by Lee and Maslog (2005), that found that reporting in the PDI, and another newspaper, The Philippine Star, displayed significantly more peace journalism in coverage of the Moro insurgency than the average of a selection of leading newspapers covering equivalent internal conflicts in other Asian countries including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

Peace journalism has, in addition, received a major boost in southern Philippines and elsewhere, through social movement activity and training initiatives. Since 2004, the Peace and Conflict Journalism Network (PECOJON) has grown to a number of national and international networks, with around 250 members in the Philippines and 165 members from fifteen countries worldwide (Patindol 2010). A number of other media organizations, such as MindaNews and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), follow similar values and framing to peace journalism.

Hence, MindaNews was chosen as the partner for the project and ABS-CBN chosen as a mainstream news organization to partner and produce the news bulletins used in this study. It meant working within the normal idiom and range of Filipino news. Various days of ABS-CBN output over the past few months were trawled through to select five recent stories that could be classified as war journalism. As they were, they would score round about one to zero on five headings: background, view, idea, prop, and peace (Shinar 2007, 200). Re-sourced, rewritten, revoiced, and repackaged as peace journalism would bring up the score to about three. Following Shinar, the following analysis explores how this was done to ensure that the stories qualified as peace journalism:

1. Exploring backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation, and presenting causes and options on every side so as to portray conflict in realistic terms, transparent to the audience (Background);

2. Giving voice to the views of all rival parties (Views);

3. Offering creative ideas for conflict resolution, development, peacemaking, and peacekeeping (Ideas);

4. Exposing lies, cover-tip attempts and culprits on all sides, and revealing excesses committed by, and suffering inflicted on, peoples of all parties (Propaganda); and

5. Paying attention to peace stories and postwar developments (Peace).

A story that includes material satisfying criteria under any one of Shinar’s (2007) five headings was allotted one point. One that includes all five scored five points. So each individual story was marked initially out of five. Following Lee and Maslog (2005), three indicators of “passive” peace journalism were then added—for the avoidance of emotive language, labeling of conflict parties as good and bad, and partisan reporting. To recognize the lesser importance of these indicators, compared with the main framing characteristics, each is allocated the score of 0.5, to be subtracted from the initial score. Scores for each media outlet can therefore be expressed as mean averages. Tables 1 and 2 offer the scores for each of the stories in the different research bulletins. A full explanation of the process of reframing follows.

Table 1. Scores of war 10UriltiliSill story versions on Shiner and Lee and Maslog criteria

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Table 2. Scores of peace journalism story versions on Shinar and Lee and Maslog criteria

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The Research Bulletins

NPA landmine story

We chose the NPA landmine incident as a fairly typical on-the-day episode of the conflict as reflected in mainstream news: an apparently isolated incident of violence. It involved two people being killed by a landmine planted by the NPA who targeted a military vehicle. In this case, however, the vehicle was carrying not only military personnel but also civilians who were being transported ‘to a so-called “peace rally'”.

The story scored -1.5 in Shinar’s headings (Table 1). The ABS-CBN report on the incident offered no significant material by way of background and context of the conflict. The only views reflected were those of the military themselves; there were no ideas for peace; no challenges to the propaganda, and no images of peace. The story lost half a point for emotive language and another half a point for being partisan by using military parlance to describe the NPA. The link from the presenter into the story begins with “Rebeldeng NPA,” which is not the term the NPA use to describe themselves but an official military designation. The script also referred to the people traveling in the military vehicle as returning from a “peace rally condemning the rebel NPA,” thus reproducing the propaganda claim that the military are attempting to bring “peace” by “defeating” the NPA.

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In the peace journalism version of the story, the studio presenter’s script referred to a bombing by the NPA, removing the military term “rebel” so the story was no longer partisan from the outset. The story subtly challenges the propaganda by neutralizing the description of the rally to make it clear it was “organized by the military to condemn the NPA,” thus registering a positive score under Propaganda.

There are lots of ideas for peace—first, by recalling to the viewers that peace talks with the NPA are about to resume in Oslo,’ but more importantly referring to main agenda idea of justice for the poor and dispossessed. This links neatly with background file pictures and reference to a recent demonstration that many people have opposed a planned gold and copper mining project in the region. Whilst scoring one for Background it also offers another idea for peace by reminding people that there are other ways to express their grievances.

The script makes a corner-turn (Lynch and McGoldrick 2005, 186) into challenging the war on terror propaganda head on by hearing from Amnesty International. The human rights organization meticulously researched the extra-judicial killings, with more than 600 people executed in a ten-year period. The Amnesty speaker made explicit reference to the Government’s exploitation of the war on terror rhetoric—rhetoric used to cloak the killing of any kind of left-wing activist opposed to the government by spuriously connecting them to the “terrorist” NPA. This element also serves to distance the story from siding with the military and the government.

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It also featured a broad range of views, including those of a Protestant Bishop and two Lumad (indigenous) leaders, shown in the photo above attending a civilian (not military) peace rally in Davao, and expressing their hopes for the peace talks to focus on underlying issues of social justice; as well as a senior representative of the NPA, Ka Oris, professing himself and the organization to be ready for dialogue. This peace journalism version would get a score of 4 under Shinar’s headings (see Table 2), still within the compass of Philippines journalism given the previous studies in content analysis.

The Flood Story

The second story in the bulletin was a recent flood in Davao del Sur on the outskirts of the city where three people were killed, including a baby and a teenager. The area had not flooded before, and there were rumors that recent development and illegal logging had caused the Sibulan River to overflow. Such stories potentially invoke another significant meaning structure transmitted from historical discursive analysis in the Philippine political context. Many of the poorest people rely on subsistence for food security, and their lifestyles therefore rely, in turn, on the integrity of life-sustaining systems of soil and water. Nettleton et al. (n.d.) show how inequitable economic development, including mining and plantations, profits corporations while expropriating vulnerable communities and compromising local environments; which can then feed indirectly into the insurgencies by prompting dispossessed or threatened people to make common cause with the rebel groups.

For the war journalism, an on-the-day situation report was chosen, which focused heavily on wailing relatives looking for loved ones and dramatic shots of the gushing waters, floating tree trunks, abandoned vehicles, and wrecked homes. The focus of the story was all about the drama of “now” and would score -0.5 (see Table 1) for having emotive language (and no material conforming to any of the peace journalism characteristics under Shinar’s headings).

The peace journalism version explored some of the background issues. The whole first half of the story remained the same then part way through came a corner-turn, with the words: “A natural disaster—but was it a man-made one, too?” Rumor had it that a newly built hydroelectric plant had disturbed the forest growth and water flow, adding to the destructive force of the river. The operating company, Hedcor, denied the allegations, explaining how engineers building the plant had secured the riverbanks, thus enhancing the water flow.

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A local farmer, interviewed for the peace journalism version, suggested other human activities, such as illegal logging, as a possible cause. Inevitably, the story touched on the global influence of climate change, perhaps making such extreme weather events more frequent and more severe in future, and a local research scientist offered an idea for a solution by suggesting that major companies developing projects in the area, such as the car firm Toyota, consider investing some of their future profits in sustainable, nonpolluting energy. Overall, this story scores 3 (see Table 2) for offering background, a broad range of views, and ideas for a solution.

MILF Breakaway Story

The third story was the latest development in the ongoing conflict for Muslim independence in Mindanao. While we imagined this to be a local story for people living in Davao, this was regarded as something happening over there in North Cotabato, a six-hour drive and what felt like a long way from Davao. We also had not appreciated the language difference between people in that region. The story chosen was the creation of an MILF splinter group, widely reported as a risk for peace, including on ABS-CBN: “The new group of Ustadz Amiril Umra Kato is a significant force that can challenge peace and stability in Mindanao,” said Rommel Banlaoi, executive director of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, referring to the commander of the breakaway.

The war journalism story selected for inclusion in the bulletin w9s comparatively moderate in tone and would have scored zero (see Table 1). It talked a lot about the GRP-MILF peace process towards the end and suggestions that the ARMM elections should be postponed and a nonpolitical leader appointed as interim head of the autonomous region, to allow breathing space for key reforms. It was coded with a positive score for this under Ideas, but as these suggestions were only from one person—MILF vice chair for political affairs Ghadzali Jaafar—and he is a political figure who may have his own vested interest in such an outcome, the story only scores half a point for ideas.

The tone and language of the feature were not emotive, but it did lean towards being partisan in Jaafar’s favor: He appears seated in his -office and is described as calm, whereas Umra Kato is depicted in the jungle with long hair, wearing a headband and waving a gun, perhaps inviting viewers to infer that he and his band of breakaways are in some way deviant—perhaps mad—which also means it is partisan in favor

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of Jaafar and loses another half a point there. While we hear from both sides—Umra Kato and Jaafar—thus justifying a positive score under View, the score is only 0.5 because we do not hear from all sides.

To convert the MILF breakaway script to peace journalism and obtain a score of 3 (see Table 2), the background of the story was opened up, and interviews conducted with a group of villagers—”non-elite” sources, as described in Galtung’s table—to broaden the range of views away from those of military-political leaders. We visited a group of Muslims families who were initially forced to flee their homes more than a decade ago due to fighting between the government and the MILF forces. Even today, they explained, they could not return home because of successive rounds of fighting. They told a tragic tale of being poorer than before due to having no land to make a decent living and the fear for their children who had no proper school to attend. Their only hope, they said, was for peace, and the forthcoming talks in Malaysia between the MILF and the Government. By bringing them into the frame the story implied that for there to be a lasting solution, these people needed to be able to return to their homes and receive some form of economic justice as well as political reform.

The Davao Shooting Story

The fourth story, about a shooting in a mall, was presented as a new development in the story of the Maguindanao massacre of November 2009, in which sixty-one people were killed, many of them journalists. The journalists had been accompanying the relatives of a local politician, Buluan Vice Mayor Ishmael Mangudadatu, en route to file his candidacy in the election for Governor of Maguindanao Province, part of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Chief suspects in the massacre were members of the Ampatuan political clan, including the former governor, Andal Ampatuan, Sr. and his son, Andal Jr. who was standing in the election.

The new development occurred during a shopping trip to Davao by Mangudadatu and surviving members of his family. The story as broadcast on ABS-CBN told how a man approached the party in a busy local mall, and tried to seize a gun belonging to one of the Vice Mayor’s bodyguards, apparently to do them harm. The apparent would-be assailant was himself shot dead at the scene, and turned out to be one Tamano Kagi Camendan, who worked (or had worked; it is not entirely clear) as a bodyguard for the Ampatuans.

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Again, a brief critical discourse analysis is needed, to disclose possible intertextual influences on meaning-making by a Davao audience. As explained in reference to the previous story, Davao folk, whilst being well aware of the unresolved separatist conflict (or struggle for self-determination) being waged elsewhere on the island of Mindanao—along with conflicts within the Moro community, such as the political conflict in Maguindanao Province—are accustomed to. regarding such upheavals as remote from their own lives; both literally, as a long journey, and conceptually. The city is enclosed by a “ring of steel,” with an army detachment, Task Force Davao (TFD), manning checkpoints and prominently standing guard outside public and major private buildings to keep such troubles where they belong: outside. The city’s long-serving former Mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, forged a reputation as a stickler for law and order. By symbolically bringing an aspect of a “Moro conflict” to the heart of their city, this shooting incident, while seemingly isolated, had the capacity to invoke historically transmitted fears of the “Other.”

There was nothing in the story as broadcast on ABS- CBN to interrupt such an interpretation. Containing nothing by way of background and context, or any other material belonging to any of the five peace journalism categories above, it was coded with a score of -1.5 (see Table 1). The low score was firstly for emotive language and pictures, particularly those of the dead Camendan. The script also labels him as a “baddy” because the story makes him guilty even though there has been no trial. To have not labelled him, the script would have needed the word “suspect.” There are several eyewitnesses included who refer to Camendan as trying to grab the gun off Mangudadatu’s bodyguard. The story paints the latter, and his entourage, in a very favorable light, implying they are the “goodies” by referring to him being in the mall with his children and reporting, without considering alternatives or entering any caveats, the supposition that he was the target. Given that other eyewitnesses, (see focus group discussion analysis below) have suggested that it was the other way round, it is reasonable to suggest that the story deserves another 0.5 deduction for being partisan and siding with the Mangudadatus.

The peace journalism script, on the other hand, scores 3 (Table 2) because it explores the background culture of intimidation and corruption in the ARMM. It is not simply the killers who are baddies (a dispositional explanation), but the killings took place in the context of a deficient structure (a situational explanation), so the whole system needs reform. A lawyer representing families who lost loved ones in the Maguindanao massacre appears on camera, pointing out that even former president Gloria Arroyo may be implicated in a corrupt relationship with Ampatuan Sr. and therefore should also be arrested. Demonstrators on the streets of Davao offer ideas for a solution to the deficient structure by calling for forthcoming elections in the ARMM3 to be postponed, lest they occasion more trouble, pending root-and-branch reforms.

The Coal Plant Row Story

To end the bulletin, another regional environmental conflict was selected, this time over proposals for a new coal-fired power station in Davao. The original story was fairly neutral in tone, setting the local councilors in favor of the plant against the plant’s opponents in a typical bipolar way. The story would score 1.0, under Shinar’s five headings, primarily because it does hear from both sides (Table 1). By giving a voice to the campaign group No to Coal Coalition, however, it merits a score of 0.5 under Views. The script is not emotive, labelling, or partisan and even goes as far as being transparent about the trip by councilors to visit another similar coal plant in Cagayan de Oro in Northern Mindanao. By saying the trip is funded by the electricity company Aboitiz, which wants to build the new coal plant, the story scores 0.5 under Propaganda, not challenging propaganda but at least for not colluding with it.

The peace journalism version of the story scores 4 (Table 2) because it goes much further by linking the coal fired power station—burning hydrocarbons as a source of energy—with global warming; it hears from a broader range of views upping the score to 1 by hearing from both Aboitiz and an environmentalist (both speakers interviewed separately to add to the original material). New pictures are used of a functioning solar power plant in Cagayan de Oro City and the point is made that the councilors on the same fact-finding trip could have made a short detour to visit this plant. This is an Idea for a solution, which could also count as an image of Peace, since it could represent humankind in harmony with the environment, using renewable energy. Efforts were made to obtain an interview with a spokesperson for the company that runs the solar plant, but this proved unsuccessful; hence there is less elaboration on this aspect than might have been ideal, so it scores only half a point.

Methodology

The study used a mixed design of gathering qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of groups watching either the war journalism or the peace journalism bulletin. It was a blind study so nobody was informed of the type of the bulletin they were watching or of the existence of another version. The aim was to come at the research from several different angles, in other words, to triangulate (Denzin 1978, 304):

Researchers must be flexible in the evaluation of their methods. Every action in the field provides new definitions, suggests new strategies, and leads to continuous modifications of initial research designs. Like other forms of interaction, sociological research reflects the emergent, novel, and unpredictable features of ongoing activity; this is the fourth principle: no investigation should be viewed in a static fashion. Researchers must be ready to alter lines of action, change methods, reconceptualize problems, and even start over if necessary. They must continually evaluate their methods, assess the quality of the incoming data, and note the relevance of the data to theory.

The quantitative data collection involved ninety-nine psychology and engineering students (thirty-three men and sixty-six women) from the Ateneo de Davao University, who volunteered to participate in exchange for a gift of snacks. They were randomly assigned to two different rooms, and informed that they were taking part in a study about television news. Each participant received an identical nineteen-page questionnaire with several pretest measures. First, we chose to expand on three other studies about television news by using the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Szabo and Hopkinson 2007; Harrell 2000; and Johnston and Davey 1997).

Second, the Differential Emotional Scale (DES) (Izard 1977) was adapted to test for differences in emotional reaction between the groups before and after seeing each of the news stories. The DES was used successfully in other research about variantly charged television news (Unz et al. 2008). The DES is a thirty-item questionnaire consisting of ten fundamental emotions, each assessed by three items. The ten fundamental emotions used in this study were: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, items is anger, disgust, contempt, fear, empathy, and guilt. Each of the thirty items rated on a five-point Likert scale.

Why measure emotions? Significant in this context is evidence that group information is processed in emotional centers of the brain. “That is, group-related reasoning and perception may well be implicit, emotional:, and untouchable via traditional cognitive and rational approaches (Argo et al. 2009, 33) and that conflict resolution is an emotionally cued process (Long and Brecke 2003, 30). This holds profound implications for considerations of media influence on the actions and motivations of parties to conflict, whether direct or indirect, linear or extra-linear. It suggests we are more likely to find differential group responses to media representations of conflict through adjusting the more emotional, less explicit content, than the more cognitive, fact-based elements: revealing elements of context and background through telling a story based on human interest, perhaps.

To take the emotional measures required pausing the video at the end of each story for students to fill out their DES; which was immediately followed by a Thought-Listing Protocol (TLP), inviting them to simply write down any notes of thoughts or feelings prompted by what they were watching (Coleman and Thorson 2002). The aim was to elicit more information about the feelings people were having while watching the news—if they were feeling angry, why were they feeling angry?

Eight other questions were added after the TLP. Four of these were to assess the student’s acceptance and opinions of the different story framings: How interesting, how balanced, how boring, and how biased (Kempf 2007) did they see it? Four questions were used to assess their evaluation of military measures test (EMMT): would they be more predisposed to militaristic, violence-escalating solutions if they watched war journalism as opposed to peace journalism (Schaefer 2006)? Each of these eight questions is rated on a seven-point Likert scale.

After watching the bulletin there were a number of simple prejudice tests: Group warmth thermometers (Correll et al. 2008) to assess if watching war journalism or peace journalism contributed to greater warmth, with 0-50 representing cold feelings and 50 or above representing warmth or positive feelings (towards outgroups, such as Muslims and Communists). Peasbody sets’ were then used to assess the variability of judgments toward the different groups. We created eight sets, asking participants to place a cross in the box closest to the adjective that best describes Muslims, Christians, and Communists: good vs. evil; hardworking vs. lazy; trustworthy vs. dishonest; safe vs. dangerous; similar vs. different; familiar vs. strange; peaceful vs. warlike; and passive vs. aggressive.

Finally, ninety-seven students filled in their demographic details revealing a mean age of 18.8 ranging from seventeen to twenty-four years of age. There was a balance of men and women in each group with thirty-three women in both, seventeen men in the war group and sixteen men watching peace.

The focus groups were included as part of the mixed-methods approach to explore via qualitative data how interactions picked up in the quantitative data were actually resonating within meaning structures transmitted from historical discourses; and to offer a richer seam of anecdotes about the news. Following a major UK study about news on the Israel-Palestine conflict (Philo and Berry 2004) in which groups of different demographics were selected, we chose to run four focus groups, two with high-income participants and two with low-income participants, with each pair watching the alternative war and peace framings.

Focus group participants also filled in their demographic details plus a pre- and post-bulletin STAI, and the DES measures. They were also invited to jot down any thoughts on the TLP boxes partly as a way or assessing whether what they said in the group differed from what was wrote in private. Then they took part in a group discussion about the news bulletin that was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed as qualitative data.

Results

State Trait Anxiety Inventory and Differential Emotional Scale Consistent with previous television news studies, pre-and post-STAI measures increased significantly, but there was no statistically significant interaction between the groups. Basically, watching television news makes people stressed, but watching war journalism does not make them significantly more stressed than watching peace journalism. This is consistent with the results from an earlier study carried out in Sydney, part of this same research, using the same methods.

What does vary is the range of feelings people go through depending on which framing of the story they watched. Mixed-model ANOVAs with tests for simple effects and interactions were used to gauge differences in terms of emotional reaction between the groups. The two groups did not differ significantly in any of the baseline measures of the DES scales. Looking first at the uncondensed emotional responses to the NPA landmine story, the war journalism group showed slightly higher increase in anger compared with the baseline measures. The levels of happiness, delight, and amazement reported by members of the war journalism group dropped significantly more, compared with baseline, than that of the peace journalism group members. The peace journalism viewers’ feelings of empathy increased by twice as much as the war journalism viewers who were also less hopeful after watching the story, but the peace journalism group were significantly more hopeful. No other significant differences were found.

Table 3. DES results before and after viewing the NPA landmine story

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The numerical results beg the question of why the peace journalism viewers were more empathic, happy, delighted, amazed, and hopeful after watching the NPA story. What were those feelings about? That is where we turn to the TLPs below.

But first, it is worth considering the other statistically significant interactions between the groups. Table 4 below denotes figures for those effects, where the absence of a number means there were no significant differences for that particular emotion. Those who watched the war journalism flood story were less amazed than those who watched the peace journalism version, suggesting that a more emotive story produces less amazement. Such implies that people are switched off by its sensationalism.

The peace journalism viewers maintained their higher levels of delight throughout the bulletin despite beginning the test less delighted than the other group. War journalism viewers of the Davao shooting showed markedly higher levels of revulsion and distaste, as well as demonstrating more empathy and compassion.

Watching the MILF breakaway story triggered a stronger sense of personal responsibility and blame in those who watched the peace journalism framing, perhaps because the war journalism story only contained men with guns and the peace journalism story included ordinary people who had suffered and survived the fighting. Significantly, viewers of the peace journalism version showed much higher levels of empathy, which increased after watching each story, whereas empathy fell for the war journalism group, even if only slightly. Indeed, the peace journalism viewers consistently experienced stronger feelings of empathy throughout the bulletin than viewers of war journalism.

Table 4. Significant DES results before and after viewing

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Note: Means are shown on the first line, standard deviations on the second in brackets for each subscale.

Thought Listing Protocols

These quantitative results were treated as an interim artifact, alerting us where to pay attention to drill down in the data to investigate why the peace journalism viewers watching, say the NPA story, prompted greater delight, happiness, hope, empathy, and slightly less anger. What were these responses about?

The TLP written responses were transcribed and themed in categories based on Entman’s (1993, 51) characterization of cognitive steps involved in framing:

To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.

What the results show for all the stories was a pronounced difference in problem diagnosis/definition and solution/treatment recommendation between the groups, suggesting that the qualitative measures were more sensitive in picking the groups’ distinctive differences in reaction to each story. In other words, they could spot the differences without being asked to find them. This was most noticeable in responses to the NPA story. For most war journalism viewers, the NPA is the problem, whereas for many in the peace journalism group, there is a shared problem, as Table 5 shows.

Table 5. TLP problem definition results front the NPA landmine story

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While the numbers in themselves are interesting, it is the tone of the comments that speaks more. Members of the war journalism group refer to “hating” the NPA, who are “pests;” they are “crazy;” and three refer to feeling anger towards the “rebels.” One war viewer was able to stand back and comment on the framing itself, noticing that the “NPA is [being] blindly accused.”

The peace journalism viewers used a softer tone in blaming the NPA, primarily asking why referring to them “look(ing) a bit funny;” them being “harsh,” “annoying,” a “nuisance,” and “merciless.” The most dramatic difference is the high number of comments about a shared problem from those who watched the peace journalism story.

They diagnose a variety of aspects of a deficient structure: “injustice;” greed;” “land;” “unequal rights;” “labeling guerrillas as terrorists … only makes matters worse” and even the “system” as the problem.

Table 6. TLP moral evaluation results from viewing the NPA landmine story

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The tone of the outrage (Table 6) about the violence was again stronger in the war journalism group, with members saying they are “angered” by the violence and that it is “unlawful,” “terrible,” and “unfair,” whereas the peace journalism viewers say they are “sad” and “angry,” again offering a possible explanation for less anger on the DES measures. The real noticeable difference in the moral evaluation is concern for the NPA by those who watched peace journalism plus concern for indigenous peoples, both of which are totally absent in the war group. This could explain why the statistics showed a marked increase in empathy in the peace journalism group, compared with the war journalism audience, which is reflected in the greater concern for victims by the peace journalism group. Comments from the two groups are fairly similar in tone, feeling “pity,” “sorry,” and “sadness.” Interestingly, the peace journalism group mentioned empathy/sympathy eight times whereas the war journalism group only mentioned it four times.

As has been already suggested, this is perhaps because the NPA war journalism framing was more emotive such that this turned people off. Offering them a more causal explanation with reference to mining, poverty, and land rights reflected the appreciation of shared problems, allowing people into the story to engage empathically both with those killed and injured in this incident and with some of the underlying factors behind the attack. Some of the participants hinted at this in their moral evaluation of the war journalism version, saying: “Media doesn’t empathize;” “media sensationalize;” “should’ve interviewed a person who is less emotional;” and “victims are not ready for interview.” This clearly implies their distaste, or at least unease, at how emotive the story was.

Another notable difference is in the solutions or treatment recommendation, to use Entman’s (1993) terminology (Table 7).

Table 7. TLP treatment recommendation results after viewing the NPA landrnine story

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The war journalism group hardly discussed solutions at all, whereas the peace journalism group came up with a total of forty comments about solutions and they were predominantly creative and nonviolent. Both groups called for the same number of security solutions. The themes reflected the peace journalism framing. Firstly, around economic justice: “Equality of resources;” “land reform;” “preserve our natural resources;” and “economic justice.” Secondly, optimism about peace talks themselves: “active non-violence;” “hopeful for peace;” “hoping for unity” and were similar to the five comments of moral evaluation about the peace talks that valued hearing others concerned about peace: “good to know that even the NPA also aims to achieve peace” and “good to know that a lot of people still fight for peace.” Perhaps this is why the peace journalism group showed much stronger feelings of enjoyment and why their hope increased whilst still watching a story about an incident of violence. On the other hand, hope fell for the war viewers. In other words, peace journalism viewers are more optimistic about peace and think more creatively about ideas for solutions. While this sounds like an unchallenged endorsement of peace journalism, with one participant writing that “the news is more informative,” there were also one or two negative moral evaluations of the NPA story itself: “Bias: they blame it on the military” and “Military is seen as negative. It sided the NPA.”

Other data from TLPs also help to explain the affective differences between groups. First of all, why did the peace journalism group remain more amazed during the story about the floods in Santa Cruz? Were there any other differences in their responses? There certainly was greater concern for the victims in the peace journalism group than the war viewers, with thirty-seven comments from the latter to peace journalism’s fifty-five. This suggests a higher empathy quotient that was not picked up in the statistical results.

There were other notable differences in TLPs for the floods. Firstly, the peace journalism viewers wrote considerably more than the war group, suggesting they found it more engaging and thought provoking. Secondly, the peace group reflected more on problem definitions, offering twenty-seven comments suggesting the floods was at least partly a man made disaster, whereas only eight who watched the war journalism version thought that. As with the NPA story, there was a stronger emphasis on solutions from the peace journalism viewers, who made thirty-two different treatment recommendations as opposed to only eighteen from the war journalism group. Of these solutions the war journalism group predominantly wanted the “government to do something,” to “take action,” whereas the peace journalism viewers offered more detailed, creative, and specific recommendations.

Interestingly, both groups made a much greater number of comments about the news itself than they did in TLPs on other stories. The ten opinions on content from the war journalism viewers centered around the intrusiveness or emotive quality of the story, particularly in showing the grieving family members. Comments included: “Highly intrusive;” “like a violation;” “dead body should not have been shown;” and “disgusted [at] the sight of dead body.” This could have suggested that the participants would be more amazed by this story, yet they were more amazed by the peace journalism. Was this because they remained more amazed by the additional background, views, and ideas framed into the peace version of the story? Several of them referred specifically to those elements in their moral evaluation, calling the item: “balanced news;” “really clear and not biased;” “excellent;” “much more interesting;” “understand the other reason/alternatives why the flood … happened.” This was validated by the statistical results from the EMMT questions, which showed a significantly greater interest in the peace frame of the floods story (Table 8).

Table 8. Significant EMMT results for each story

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The peace journalism version of the MILF breakaway story elicited a greater sense of responsibility and personal blame. Their feelings of delight and empathy were higher when they watched this, compared with the war group. The TLPs showed a similar pattern in the variance of responses as those to the NPA story: namely war viewers blamed the rebels, this time the MILF and Umra Kato, more than the peace viewers, with twenty-five comments to fourteen, respectively. In addition, those war comments had a more demonizing tone: ” H at red;” “horrible;” “crazy;” and one call to “kill those rebels.”

It is noteworthy that the war journalism version of the Urn ra Kato breakaway group contained ideas about peace, and was awarded half a point for that element. This is reflected in the fifteen comments from war viewers versus almost double from the peace journalism group, who made twenty-eight points about peace as a solution. Almost the same number, twenty-nine, expressed hopeful opinions in their moral evaluations of the peace talks, which could explain their higher enjoyment of the story.

The greater empathy is alluded to in comments about the civilian victims of the war in the peace journalism version, victims who do not appear in the war journalism version. There are twenty-two opinions about them, not only expressing empathy, but also a sense of blame and responsibility: “I feel ashamed for myself because I have something but they have nothing;” “I empathize with the affected families;” and “I feel bad about the affected civilians.” There was also a divergence in the number of comments about Umra Kato himself: Fifty-nine from the peace group and forty from the war viewers. The tone is fairly similar between the groups: some expressing anger, confusion, and concern for children seen holding guns. This is not surprising as the footage and script for this section of the story are identical in both versions. Finally peace viewers offered praise for their version with several calling it “informative” and “balanced.” The war viewers on the other hand criticized the story saying it was “too long” and “boring.”

The Davao shooting story produced stronger differences in feelings of revulsion and distaste, with the peace journalism group feeling the most—but at the same time, also feeling more delight, compassion, and empathy. Why? Both groups wrote relatively equal moral outrage about the violence, expressing their shock and fear about the shooting happening in “their” mall: “My morn goes there regularly to shop.” But the peace viewers were the only ones to express outrage about the “background event,” the Maguindanao massacre itself. Remember this background was not brought into the war journalism version, so it makes sense that peace viewers would express opinions, feeling “angry” and “alarmed” by the “horrible” massacre. This appears to have fueled their revulsion and distaste as this was the only story where the peace journalism group blamed individuals more than the war journalism group, with twenty-two pointing a finger at the families, and only eleven war viewers said the Ampatuans and Mangudadatus were the problem. The comments were stronger, with the peace viewers expressing more “hate.”

Consistent with the other stories though, the peace journalism group offered almost three times the number of solutions than offered by the war journalism group. Of the thirty-nine solutions from the peace group, eight called for a reform of the political system as well as improvements in security and calls for justice. The war journalism group gave fourteen solutions that were primarily about tighter security. It is worth noting that the EMMT responses demonstrated that the peace version was less biased than the war version (Table 8). There were double the number of opinions about the peace story content, with several praising the news for showing “what’s true” and “blurred the dead body, it’s better.” The war journalism viewers on the other hand named the “sensationalism,” describing the news as “careless coverage” particularly for showing the dead body.

The coal plant row left the peace journalism group feeling more responsible, delighted, and empathic. As with the NPA story, the peace journalism story was coded with the higher score of 4, but the war journalism coal plant row was starting from a higher baseline than some of the others, scoring 1 for including some wider views and challenges to propaganda. Less pronounced differences could therefore have been anticipated, compared with the differential responses to the other stories.

The moral evaluation of the coal plant is fairly similar between the two groups, with almost equally small numbers professing agreement with the building of the plant (seven for it in the war journalism group; seven for it in the peace journalism group) and similarly large numbers in each group opposing it (thirty-two opposed to the coal plant in the war journalism group; thirty-nine opposed in the peace journalism group). The biggest difference again, though less significant than with previous stories, was the number of solution comments, with thirty-four offered by the peace journalism viewers and twenty-two from the war journalism viewers. This could explain the greater degree of personal responsibility and empathy felt by the peace journalism viewers, who appear to engage more with it as a personal issue.

Both groups called for more information on the safety issues around the proposed plant, in particular the effect on public health in the area and along the transport routes the coal would follow. But there is a much stronger emphasis from the peace journalism viewers on suggestions for renewable energy like solar power, which is not surprising given that idea was framed into the story they saw, and not mentioned in the war journalism version. This was contradicted by the EMMT results (Table 8), which showed the war journalism viewers making a stronger call for renewable energy, but the peace journalism viewers finding the story less boring—which could explain theft higher enjoyment scores and stronger positive opinions of the peace journalism news: “Both sides were taken;” “meaning the effects of having a coal plant in our health made me change my mind;” and “interesting news.” Such comments hint at why the enjoyment scores were higher.

Cognitive and Emotional Impact of News Framing

To explore how far the different framings could be picked up in the four focus groups, the transcripts were coded like the news bulletins according to Shinar’s (2007) five headings: exploring backgrounds and contexts; giving a voice to the views of all rival parties; offering creative ideas for conflict resolution; challenging propaganda by going beyond the official versions of events; and by paying attention to peace stories. The three passive peace journalism indicators (Lee and Maslog 2005)—avoidance of emotive language, labeling of conflict parties as good and bad, and partisan reporting—were added as heading guides to theme the focus group comments. Primarily, the war journalism viewers talked about what was absent from the stories, whereas the peace journalism group spoke more about what was present, noticing the new elements of background, views, ideas, and challenges to propaganda.

The strongest statements came from the high-income focus groups. To illuminate those differences, the comments are presented according to their heading rather than the story, although during the focus groups they discussed the bulletin story by story.

Background

The peace journalism viewers had the immediate reaction of considering the news to be “very complete… like we can get the whole story,” in the words of one high-income participant. Another called it “informative.” The war journalism viewers, on the other hand, spoke most about what was missing from the bulletin: “I did feel there was something lacking” and “there’s always something missing.” They also pointed out that there wasn’t enough explanation in the stories: “Why is this flood going on?” and “Why do we need the coal plant?” One high-income participant felt so misinformed by the news at the time about the Davao shooting that she visited the mall herself to investigate:

A lot of people said that what the news presented was not really correct. They said it was Mangudadatu who really started the shooting, and there was this innocent guy who passed by who just so happened … [to be] connected to Ampatuan. It has … a flip side of the story to make it appear as dies a loyal bodyguard of Ampatuan who wanted to kill Mangudadatu and all that. So in some ways I was looking for that in the news …, but it was not presented.

Views

There was a unanimous response from the peace journalism group that the bulletin was “balanced,” appreciating in particular the views of the head of the NPA Ka Oris:

… [it is] only now I saw the real explanation … [from] the head of the NPA and listen[ed] to him and both sides represented; [it’s] not like when you listen to the discussion on … television, it’s cut and… [you] don’t know the vision of the leader.

The war journalism viewers were quick to retort the opposite, referring to the absence of an NPA voice: “It’s another side of the story that hasn’t been presented.” A similar opinion commented about a lack of views: “There are like two sides to every story or sometime three or four or five sides, so something is missing.”

Propaganda

Reference to propaganda was fairly similar between the groups. Those watching the war journalism version felt the MILF and the Umra Kato breakaway group were “ego tripping” and that the story was essentially a propaganda “show of power.” The latter was echoed by a peace viewer: “Breakaway, breakaway, breakaway. and it breaks… another breakaway, it will not… are they still serious [about] peace or what? Because it seems like they are playing with the people.”

Ideas

Immediately after watching the war journalism bulletin, viewers expressed a great deal of frustration about a lack of ideas and solutions: “You get tired of hearing the same things again and again with no solutions.” These comments came spontaneously, not in response to a leading question: “I’m really saddened I cannot do anything about it,” one said. About the flood story, a woman reflected, “One thing missing is that they also did not say how we can help.” Another woman wanted more ideas for the electricity shortage in the coal plant row story: “Present some alternatives, and if not a coal plant, what other alternatives are there?”—as if calling for the very content that was included in the peace journalism version, but not in the war journalism version she saw. There were less strong statements from the peace journalism viewers, but after watching the flood story, one woman felt it prompted her to think about solutions: “It also highlights the need for cooperation in society.” The peace ideas in the MILF story left one man with a sense of “optimism,” but others felt more “hopelessness” about the peace process after watching the peace version.

Peace

No one specifically spoke about the need for peace stories and postwar developments other than the comments of pessimism about the peace talks not leading to successes in communities. “Peace negotiations done here in the Philippines do not yield any tangible results,” said one male peace journalism viewer. Even though there are some small-scale examples of such developments in pockets around Mindanao, these were not included in the research bulletins.

Emotive

The war journalism viewers specifically referred to the emotive tone of the bulletin: “What is being shown are gross in a way, they have to show [people] crying for a long time.” One participant said she was so fed up with the sensationalism of local news that she switched off altogether:

I stopped watching the news because it was all about killing, and I said I will now start reading the papers because the papers won’t show you anything because it was so … I think the problem here is they have these ratings game, and they want to make everything sensationalized. Eventually, you just switch off and stop watching the news.

One of the peace journalism viewers had a similar response: “It tends to blind me when it comes to the emotions of the victims.”

Label

The nondemonizing tone of the peace journalism bulletin was picked up by one man who first wrote in his TLP about the Davao shooting, “At least Islam was not blamed” then said to the group:

The MILF breakaway news and then the Davao shooting—what’s good with the news is that it was presented not in a way where Islam is put in a bad light… the idea that Islam is behind the violence was not really presented, it’s really issues of people who adhere to Islam not because of Islam but that they are violent.

This is almost the mirror opposite of a comment made by a war journalism viewer: “In the news they usually put the NPA there, the MILF in a very bad light.”

Partisan

The only comment about the partisanship of the war journalism bulletin was: “I feel when things happen to NPAs, they cry… human rights… but when things happen to the military, there’s no human rights, they are so one-sided.” A peace journalism viewer was concerned about the slightly nuanced partisanship towards the ordinary people in the floods story: “I thought the people were more credible than Hedcor itself because they were given more length [airtime] in their interview.”

So it is clear that watching a news bulletin, blind participants can clearly discern the primary distinctions between war journalism and peace journalism, without any prior knowledge of the discursive differences. These differences were not picked up by the lower-income focus groups to anything like the same extent. In the war journalism group, they talked about the need for more information and more solutions from the news, but when the other group received it in the peace journalism bulletin they were unable to recognize it in the same way the high-income participants had. There were clear language difficulties for these groups that had to be run through a translator, thus limiting the degree of sophistication of the discussion. But in the peace journalism group in particular, they were answering the questions from their own opinion about the issues, rather than in response to what they had seen, making it hard to assess what impact the bulletin had had.

The focus group participants also filled in TLPs and before and after STAI and DES measures, primarily to see if theft written comments matched their verbal comments in the group, as people can feel inhibited in a group setting to express their real opinions. The TLPs also serve as memory jogger for people to return to their spontaneous thoughts at the time. Quite often then in the focus groups, participants would begin a comment by saying “I wrote down…” As with the students’ TLPs, these were themed using Entman’s characterization of cognitive steps involved in framing namely: problem diagnosis, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation.

As with the students the most significant differences came in the NPA story. While both groups saw the NPA as the problem, one war viewer felt “hatred” whereas one peace viewer felt “anger.” Only the peace viewers saw the military as the problem, or referred at all to shared problems. Equally, the peace viewers were the only ones to make a moral evaluation of the peace process, passing both negative and positive opinions about peace. Two war viewers did suggest peace talks as a solution even though this was not present in the story. War viewers focused their comments primarily, on concern for the “civilians caught in the crossfire.” So was the conclusion that those who watch peace journalism think more about cooperative solutions upheld in the focus groups? Yes, and again it is worth noting how they think about them. Peace viewers tended to be more hopeful and creative in their solutions particularly in the floods, MILF, and Davao shooting stories. Also, after watching the coal story, more peace viewers were against the plant than war viewers.

Limits of Research

With a total of 308 questions to answer, some students were clearly exhausted by the end, as some peace journalism viewers reflected in their TLPs: “I need more time;” “I wish to rewind the video;” and “I’m having a mental overload because I’m too alone, and no information from the video clip is sinking in.” It is worth noting that the peace group between them wrote a full ten pages more than the war group. Was that because they were different people or because they were watching different material? That again is hard .to conclude. While the students were writing quickly by hand in a second language, the majority of their comments were easy to read. At times though, the full meaning was hard to decipher as some were brief and misspelled, which impacts the reliability of the coding that was done.

The self-reporting emotional questionnaires (DES and STAI) have their limits too as people do not always know what they feel and/or use different adjectives in different ways. Whilst it is not surprising that the STAI results between the groups did not show differences in anxiety levels, it is interesting that DES did not demonstrate stronger interactions for individual emotions. There are issues of statistical reliability due to the number of questions and relatively small interactions.

For these reasons, future research could peer under the hood of the human mind, as perhaps as little as one percent of brain activity is conscious (McGilchrist 2010, 187) by using physiological measures, such as Heart Rate Variability and skin conductance measures to explore affect and empathy (Gomez et al. 2009; Lamm et al. 2008; Oliveira-Silva and Goncalves 2011; and Wallentin et al. 2011).

Conclusion

Peace journalism was a “going concern” in journalist training and in social movement activity for media reform long before it became a significant focus of scholarship. Peace journalism “made a leap from theory to practice,” Lee and Maslog (2005, 313) say, “without the benefit of research.” Since then, this gap has been filled, with a large proportion of published research taking the form of operationalizing the peace journalism model into sets of evaluative criteria for content analysis (see, notably, several contributions to Ross and Tehranian 2008).

The likely influence of peace journalism in specific settings, on audience perceptions and the framing of key issues in conflict, has largely remained a matter for conjecture, however. Kempf (2007) showed how responses by newspaper readers differed when exposed to “escalation” or “de-escalation-oriented framings” of reports on the conflict in former Yugoslavia. A study of reader responses to crime stories in a U.S. university (Thorson et al., 2003) showed greater receptiveness to “peaceful” policy prescriptions—when the stories were framed to include material about structural causes.

The significance of this research is that it confirms, for the first time, that framing television news reports of conflicts of different, kinds along the lines of war journalism and peace journalism, respectively, exerts an ideational effect, influencing how people make meaning from what they have seen. The strongest effect comes when viewers have the opportunity to consider backgrounds and contexts of violent incidents (whether the proximate act of violence is by direct human agency, such as the laying of a landmine, or natural, such as a destructive flood, that may have been exacerbated by human activity).

In such cases, peace journalism viewers become much more likely to volunteer, unprompted, and think about solutions to the problem highlighted. There is a further distinction to be made that peace journalism viewers offer predominantly more creative, nonviolent ideas for solutions. The elements of Galtung’s original peace journalism model—conflict-oriented, solution-oriented—begin to slot together. It also confirms Cohen’s (1963) aphorism that the media are successful not in telling us what to think, but what to think about.

The inclusion of testimony by people directly affected by a conflict—the farmers in the floodplain, the villagers who fled their homes, the Lumad leaders forced off their land—enables a strong response of empathy, which replaces an otherwise strong tendency to apportion “blame” to one party. This connects with a new interdisciplinary field of the science of empathy (Rifkin 2009; McGilchrist 2010; Baron-Cohen 2011; Vignemont and Si nger 2006; and Oliveira-Silva and Goncalves 2011). Empathy opens a new avenue for future peace journalism research. What do peace journalism viewers mean when they refer to empathy? Are they simply tuning into the emotions of “other” or do they also feel motivated to action with pro-social behavior (Thomas et al. 2009, 326)?

In his 600-page historical reflection on human consciousness, the social commentator Jeremy Rifkin (2009) uses empathy as a marker of civilization. British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (2011, 6) suggests we substitute the term “zero empathy” for “evil” as it offers more explanation. He suggests “empathy erosion” is made possible by turning the other into an object (Buber 1970). Such is the very core of war journalism, thanks to the key element of propaganda—namely that the propaganda efforts by various parties to conjure up political spectacles (Edelman 1988), built around psychological distancing from a demonized and/or mysterious ‘Other’ (the “rebels”‘ or “the wrath of nature”). So the “truth-oriented” (as opposed to “propaganda-oriented”) lobe of the peace journalism model fits in as well. It also fits with another dimension of empathy: that the more we understand and can take the perspective of the “Other,” the greater the chance of empathy (Oliveira-Silva and Goncalves 2011) and our greatest chance to tap an underutilized resource for peace (Baron-Cohen 2011, 183).

There are, moreover, indications that viewers prefer the peace journalism style of reporting and would like to see more. With the news they presently receive, there is a widespread perception that significant story elements are persistently missing, at least among viewers who have opportunities to think critically about it. The peace journalism versions of stories in the research material were carefully calibrated to be within reach for journalists working in Davao television newsrooms. There is some peace journalism in Philippines media, so there could be more. And if there were, it would have a significant impact on the perceptions of key conflict issues among readers and audiences.