I was honored to speak at the +Peace “Peacebuilding Action Week” on Monday, 14 Sept. The +Peace team assigned me an interesting topic: How People are Impacted by Violent News.”
I begin with a quick overview of the ubiquitiousness of violence in news media, which has been well documented by numerous researchers. I put my own spin on the topic, and added a new source of violence (and its accompanying fear) in the media: campaign commercials, and especially those from the Trump campaign. I showed one commercial featuring an older women menaced by a burglar intended to deliver an “unsafe in Biden’s America” message.
The meat of my presentation, following a break-out discussion asking participants to analyze media images, was on peace journalism, and how it can offer an antidote to the traditional violent narratives that I discussed earlier in my presentation. Specifically as it relates to violence, I offered nine suggestions for applying PJ to reducing violence and sensationalism:
• Provide context; report trends
• Make crime coverage less episodic
• Make crime coverage less episodic
• Don’t sensationalize
• Bloody images necessary?
• Don’t glorify the crime
• Use neutral language, not: slaughter, bloody, massacre, martyr
• Call out fear-mongering politicians
• No notoriety for shooters/manifestos
• No notoriety for shooters/manifestos
• Report about solutions
+Peace’s Peacebuilding Action Week continues Wednesday-Friday this week. “Peace in our homes and communities” is the theme today, followed by “Peace in our Cities Thursday,” and “Peace in our World” Friday. You can register and find out more at https://pluspeace.org/peacebuilding-action-week-2020 .
This was my first and, I hope, not my last engagement with +Peace, which “is activating a global movement of people that are invested in building a culture of peace - grounded in our peacebuilding realities & the hope of our collective futures,” according to its website.
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