Internal Conflict Reporting in Ethiopian Newspapers: Peace Journalism or War Journalism
Currently, conflict seems to be highly prevailing in many African countries due to various reasons. The Horn of Africa is especially known as a place where recurrent conflicts have occurred due to ethnic, religious, border, unfair control of resources and others. Since Ethiopia is in the Horn of Africa where it bears strategic importance for many nations, the country has been facing various conflicts.
It is clear that the mass media can play an important role in making aware of the government and other concerned parties to take both pre-emptive action in preventing and resolving conflicts and post conflict reactions. In view of Peace Journalism, concentrates on the positive values of journalism in ensuring peace during conflicts and wars, the media shall pay more attention when they frame and cover conflict stories.
Despite the differences on journalism between developing and developed world in terms of resources, training and contexts (media ownership, politics culture and others), investigating how PJ has been practiced in Ethiopia will be another (most probably different) dimension and contribution to the theory. In conditions that ownership, editorial decision, and professionalization in the Ethiopian media are likely to have impacts on journalism, assessing how internal conflicts have been covered will surely add new perspective on the conceptual framework of PJ.
Precisely, the project is, first, to examine how internal conflicts in Ethiopia have been covered on the local newspapers, and then to empirically assess the effectiveness of the emerging model of PJ in the local media in the country. These explorations will in turn help to add values on the growing body of research and attempts to make a conceptual contribution to the debates on PJ theory.