Peace journalism or war journalism? A comparative analysis of the coverage of Israeli and Turkish newspapers during the Gaza flotilla crisis

This thesis examines the peace journalism model, created by Johan Galtung in the 1970s, and argues that the model could be an alternative approach for the mainstream news media’s reporting practices, especially in times of conflict. In his model, Galtung presents peace journalism and war journalism as two competing frames in the news coverage of conflict. For the present study, I applied both textual analysis and quantitative content analysis to the coverage of the Gaza flotilla crisis of 2010 between Israel and Turkey in two English-language daily newspapers from Israel (The Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz) and two from Turkey (Today’s Zaman and Hürriyet Daily News) between May 31st and June 30th 2010. The analysis showed that more than two-thirds of the articles could be classified as dominant war journalism framing, compared to slightly more than one-quarter as peace journalism. The analysis focused on the newspapers’ provocative role in the crisis, as well as the story types (news report, editorial, op-eds, etc.), the production source of stories, the indicators of peace and war journalism, and the relationships between these factors. Moreover, I examined the viability of the peace journalism model and tested its ways of telling stories through rewriting the articles used in the present case study. The thesis concludes that some principles of the model could be more easily adopted by journalists than others. However, without reforming the structural problems at the root of modern journalism, it is unlikely that the peace journalism model will gain wider acceptance