David Astley from ABU

Excerpts from

KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY DAVID ASTLEY

SECRETARY-GENERAL, ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING UNION

TO THE DEUTSCHE WELLE GLOBAL MEDIA FORUM

BONN, GERMANY, 2 JUNE 2008.

 

The Role of Broadcasting Unions in Peace Building and Conflict Prevention

 

(…)

I have been with the ABU for six years now, and in that time I have attended many conferences on the role of the media in conflict prevention and peace building; and the role of media in HIV/AIDS prevention; and the role of media in achieving the Millennium Development Goals; and the role of media in creating awareness of climate change; and so on; but what I notice about all these conferences as far as the industry participants are concerned, is that it’s predominantly the same people who are attending them, and they are mainly people at management level - not the people who are working on a daily basis behind the camera and behind the microphone, and who need to be educated about the practices of peace journalism.

So that’s why I am wondering whether we are reaching the journalists, editors and producers who are responsible for what goes to air.  They are the people that need to understand what peace journalism is all about.  They are the people who need to be educated about the background to the conflicts that they are covering so that their reports can be objective and so that they can put into practice some of the principles of peace journalism.

To ensure that I am not misunderstood, I must emphasise that I am not criticising events like this forum.  There is certainly a need for these issues to be debated at this level, where we can bring together industry professionals and decision makers with academics, researchers, politicians and representatives of international agencies.

What I am saying is that is organisations like the broadcasting unions, and other capacity building institutions, that have to critically evaluate how we can best translate this dialogue into behavioural changes at the day-to-day working level in the broadcasting organisations that make up our membership.

I tried to work out how many journalists, editors and producers there are working in the electronic news media around the world.

It’s not a figure that you can obtain by googling – I tried that unsuccessfully – but using my knowledge of the countries in which I have worked, and then applying some averages on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I came up with a figure of between 700,000 and 800,000.

But how many of those do we reach each year with all of the training, workshops and seminars that the broadcast unions and other organisations undertake – that’s events apart from conferences like this where we are reaching only a limited number of professionals at the day-to-day working level.

I think the figure would be quite a few thousand when you take account of all the training on this topic that is undertaken by the various training institutions around the world.  Maybe around 5,000.  But even if it was a few thousand more, that would still only less than one per cent of the professionals working in this field.

So if outcomes of the dialogues that we engage in, and conclusions of the research that academics undertake, don’t reach more than one per cent of the practitioners on the ground in our industry – the men and women who produce the daily news reports and the background documentaries – how can we expect the role of the media in this field to have any impact on preventing conflicts or contributing to peace?

(...)

After all, we can’t bring three quarters of a million editors and journalists to conferences, like this every year.

The answer is yes, we can make a difference, but we need to do it not just by trying to bring more people to more workshops and seminars, but by taking the information that is the output of events like this, and of research that is undertaken by academics and some of the media research organisations working in this field, and translating that information into practical guidelines and codes of conduct that can be utilised on a daily basis by broadcasters and news agencies.

Many of the larger public broadcasters around the world – as well as many of the international news channels – have already done this, and have done it well.  But even they need to keep updating their manuals, to take account of analysis and research into the impact that the media may be having on particular conflicts.

For smaller broadcasters, and especially those in developing countries who have limited resources, the ABU and other organisations can assist in providing material that can be incorporated into in-house training programmes, editorial guidelines, and the like.

There are already some very good publications that have been produced in this regard, but I have to say that the content of some of them tends to be too academic to be of practical value in some of the countries in our region where there are journalists who have been trained on-the-job, straight out of high school, or have drifted into a reporting role with little formal media training.

Even those more qualified, with university degrees, sometimes find it hard to translate an academic perspective into what they are doing on a day-to-day basis.

I remember at one of our workshops on the subject of peace journalism, an academic defined peace journalism as “A use of conflict analysis and transformation to renew perceptions of balance, fairness and accuracy in journalistic interventions”.

I recall seeing a lot of blank faces amongst the workshop participants.  I guess some were probably thinking: “What on earth is this man talking about?”

With due respect to all the academics amongst us today, sometimes they do forget that the average journalist is not a university professor, and most don’t think and write like they are preparing a thesis.

For those organisations, like the ABU, that are involved in capacity building, we can play a vital role in helping broadcasters to prepare material in plain, simple language, that can effect changes in the way that conflict situations are interpreted and reported on - but utilising the research, findings and recommendations that can be made available to us by the many experts working in this field.

In theory, that sounds quite simple, but I have to caution that we do face some challenges in achieving this.

(...)

If we can achieve that; if we can reach the editors and journalists who have to make the choices of what stories to report, and how to report them, in such a way that they create opportunities for their audiences to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict; then we should be able to claim that we have made a useful contribution to facilitating a positive and pro-active role for the media in conflict prevention and peace building.

Thank you.