This research aims at exploring the relationship between travel motivation and tourists’ attitude toward a destination. The study also aims at assessing the mediating role played by destination image between travel motivation and tourists’ attitude toward destination. Data for the study has been collected from tourists visiting Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir state of India) during the month of July to September (N = 350). Utilizing two theoretical lenses, that of the theory of image and theory of planned behavior, findings of the study revealed positive relationship between tourists’ travel motivation and their attitude toward the destination, which is mediated by destination image. Furthermore, this study contributes by signifying that tourism marketers need to make every possible effort to enhance travel motivation of tourists, so as to build positive image and favorable attitude of tourists toward the destination.

This study combined the key findings of a dozen empirical studies with an original qualitative investigation aimed at understanding the dynamics of conflict journalism in Pakistan. The author devised an original contextual model and tested its applicability in five different conflicts of varying intensity. The study found that conflict journalism is dependent on the interaction between two key factors: the journalistic assessment of a conflict in terms of its seriousness of threat to national security and the resultant flak that stems from various sources that significantly influence professional reporting. The article concludes that journalists working in the semi-democratic, conflict-marred settings of Pakistan adopt a more vigilant and independent stance if they perceive a conflict to be posing an enormous threat to national security, for example the Taliban conflict, and that their critical stance erodes to a more compromising position in the case of a medium-level threat in conflicts such as the one in Balochistan and the ethno-political conflict in Karachi; their reporting further diminishes to a more sensational stance in the case of a low-level threat conflict due to the preponderance of the commercial interests of media industries.

This article combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to investigate the reporting of the Taliban conflict in Pakistan media and finds the coverage escalatory and elitist from the peace journalism perspective. While the security-related aspects of the conflict are highlighted, the problems of victims are ignored. The data for this study were collected through content analysis, discourse analysis and interviews with conflict reporters and analysts. The key findings of this study are quite consistent with the existing peace journalism scholarship that in conflict where national interests are involved, media become nationalistic and patriotic, leaving behind the considerations of quality and good journalism.

This study analyzes the scholarship on the classification of war and peacemaking potential of media in the conflict-ridden milieu of Pakistan. Borrowing from peace studies and the existing journalistic practices in the country, the researchers present and empirically test a new model for evaluating conflict journalism in terms of its escalatory and de-escalatory trends. For this purpose, news stories telecasted in two leading TV channels (PTV and Geo News) relating to seven deadly conflicts were analyzed. We found support for our model—the higher the intensity of a conflict, the higher the escalatory trends in coverage. Patriotic and elite-controlled media produced more escalation as compared to conflict in which journalists were using relatively free media. Despite the dominance of escalatory coverage, we also found some traces of peace journalism in the reporting of conflicts. The study recommends that to promote peace journalism in Pakistan and elsewhere, the local context of a conflict and the journalistic environment should be studied. A mere replication of Western scholarship on peace journalism in non-Western settings would render it an impracticable ideal in real conflict scenarios.

Following seminal study on journalistic attitudes towards wars and peace journalism, in this study we investigated the perceptions of conflict reporters in the three most deadly countries in the world including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A total of 317 journalists participated in this study. Though generally we found support for the earlier study, the analysis shows journalists engage in wider practices than predicted that overlap war and peace journalism approaches. A closer examination showed that journalists favored active war journalism practices and passive peace journalism practices. Finally, we did not find that journalistic experience and contextual factors influenced preferences towards war and peace journalism substantially.