The civil norm building role of news journalism in post-civil war settings

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide an answer to the question of the role that news journalism can play in the building of civil peace as peaceful cooperation in post-civil war settings. Alternatively expressed, how it can utilise its communicative capacity to facilitate and contribute to contextually and culturally appropriate versions of sustainable peace within civil society. Peacebuilding tool kits are wide and varied and often narrowly focus on news journalism as a political actor and its role in political life. We would like to shift the focus away from the ‘political’ to the role that news journalism can play in the (re-)building of an associative and cooperative civil society. Specifically, we believe that news journalism should and can develop for itself an ethos of civil norm building that aims to stimulate a civil consciousness in its audiences which is indispensable for the practical application of the civil norms of peaceful cooperation in everyday life. To understand how such an ethos can be developed we need to recognise three features that are necessary for news journalism to achieve its potential as a civil norm builder: 1) its transformative communicative capacity, 2) its institutional and organisational commitment toward news reporting that exemplifies peaceful cooperation in everyday life and 3) the way it can concretely undertake the application of editorial guidelines in post-civil war settings which exemplify the three basic categories of civil norms of peaceful cooperation: (a) assent to civil peace, (b) substantive civility and (c) building civil capacity and civil competencies.

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