Framing skeletons: peace journalism in documentaries about the conflict in Darfur

Abstract

In 1965 Johan Galtung proposed an alternative paradigm to traditional war journalism. The peace journalism paradigm is built around four main pillars related to the functions of media frames as defined by Entman (1993); defining the problem, identifying causes, making moral judgements and suggesting remedies or solutions. The attention surrounding the war- and peace journalism debate has focussed largely on the structural constraints in written press media, preventing peace journalism from really challenging the dominant war journalism paradigm. But the digitalization of the media industry led to a more widely available variety of sources about conflicts. There is a substantive lack of knowledge surrounding peace Journalism in documentaries about war. In this study, a content analysis is performed on four documentaries about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan. By combining Entman’s (1993) functions of frames and the four pillars of peace journalism set out by Galtung (1965), it shows the opportunities and challenges for peace journalism in documentaries about war.