ELEMENTS OF PEACE JOURNALISM IN SERBIAN MEDIA: A CASE STUDY OF THE ISRAELI–PALESTINIAN CONFLICT ON NEWS PORTALS DANAS AND KURIR
ELEMENTS OF PEACE JOURNALISM IN SERBIAN MEDIA: A CASE STUDY OF THE ISRAELI–PALESTINIAN CONFLICT ON NEWS PORTALS DANAS AND KURIR

Summary/Abstract: Peace journalism, as a counter-concept of war journalism, has occupied the attention of media theorists for more than 20 years. Starting from the premise that war journalism, driven by commercial interests, leans towards sensationalism, peace journalism is suggested as a viable alternative framework for conflict reporting. While war journalism focuses on violence, the propaganda efforts of political elites and stereotypical polarisations, peace journalism is expected to provide a broader, more substantial, and accurate representation of conflict. Given this theoretical framework, the aim of the article is to examine the elements and perspective of peace journalism in Serbian media practice, using the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study. The article employs comparative analysis and quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The quantitative analysis is based on five opposing indicators typical of war and peace journalism, which have been previously used in the work of Nicole Yang Lai Fong (2009). Those indicators are: elite-oriented vs. people-oriented; differences-oriented vs. reports the areas of agreement; focuses on here and now vs. reports causes and consequences; dichotomises the good and bad vs. avoids labelling of good guys and bad guys; and partisan vs. non-partisan. The corpus consists of journalistic texts published at the beginning of the conflict, from October 7 to October 13, 2023, as well as texts published between April 22 and April 28, 2024. The analysed texts were published in online editions of the daily newspapers Kurir and Danas. The results showed that indicators typical of peace journalism are significantly less present compared to indicators typical of war journalism - regardless of whether it is about tabloids or professional media. Also, sensationalism is still the primary approach when it comes to reporting on such topics.

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