Friday, February 29, 2008 Oledan: Alternative arena By Radzini Oledan
DEVELOPMENT communicators play a crucial role in the peace building process here in Mindanao. Last week, I was invited to the gathering of Mindanao development communicators where participants presented some of the challenges in development communication and provided critique to their approaches. It also explored peace journalism as an alternative.
These are choices that cannot be dispelled or obscured by the notion of objectivity or claims that journalists just report facts.
Gone are the days when journalists tell who, what, where, when and how---even at great length. Certain realities today points out on the need to provide context. There is also the pressure from the public to ask, what about WHY?
What makes the role of journalists crucial in the Mindanao peace building process and even in the international arena is their participation in building Mindanao's 'herstory.' Events would show that parties to conflict base their actions partly on calculations about how they will be reported.
We are talking about the feedback loop.
Journalists' responses influence the future behavior of parties to the conflict. Many actors in news stories adapt their behavior in order to provide facts for journalists to report. Thus, we feed into the actions of parties to the conflict, who are concerned to hold public interest on their own terms and prepared to calibrate their policies to do so.
The feedback loop suggests that there is no effective choice for journalists between involvement in a story and just reporting the facts. News as a process is always already involved in the facts that it reports, whether or not practitioners seek or welcome it.
This is an ethical and practical approach. Ethical because they are based on an honest engagement with the influence that news may exert on the course of events. It is also practical as they are derived from an important shared resource.
There is no measure though on the extent of that influence, any more than you can retrieve a single color from a tin of mixed paint. It does mean that each journalist carries a share of responsibility for what happens next.
The central issue is whether journalists can build into the processes of newsgathering, reporting, editing and producing, some responsibility for the influence of the choices they exert.
It follows that in covering conflict, those who seek to apply ethical values from their work could benefit from studying the dynamics of the conflict itself. There is also recognition that conflicts can be positive and constructive, by opening avenues for change, if managed effectively.
Peace and development work then must include recognizing and even removing the structural violence at the grassroots. It is the recognition and respect to the expertise of the locals, listening to their voices and taking these voices into account. There is no need to wait for leaders to talk about peace before we include the discourse of peace in news reportage.
In practical terms, it means that many grassroots initiatives in Mindanao geared towards alleviating the effects of structural violence are worth reporting about.
News is about change. We pick up today's paper to find out what changed since yesterday. Realism is the belief that change is only brought about by the state, by government and armed groups. It is also understanding the typology of violence where direct physical violence is just a manifestation, and structural and cultural violence as the other.
This endeavor requires balance, which should go beyond telling how it is, with a quote from either side. It may mean equipping us to see how each side's story came to be. This is both learning and unlearning process and part of which is to make conflict understandable by exploring complexities rather than perpetuating distortions.
