Eighth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Although peace journalism is growing as a field of study, there are only a limited number of empirical studies that have systematically tested its effects. This study attempts to fill this lack by testing the effects of peace journalism interventions. The context for this study comes from Sri Lanka, where the ethnic cleavage between the Sinhala and Tamil people are sustained even after the end of the almost 30-year-long civil war. Media, a political propaganda machine during conflicts continue to hold influence in post-conflict societies with its power to disseminate and sustain narratives. Therefore, this study set out to find whether peace journalism values can help reduce the identity gap, which is operationalized as the distance between in-group and out-group attitudes. This research approaches the question innovatively through a role-playing experiment design. This 2 x 3 (Sinhala and Tamil primes x War, Peace, and Control Treatments) completely between-subjects study primed U.S. participants to take on the role of Sri Lankan ethnic identities. The results show that peace interventions are effective in reducing the identity gap among Tamil-primed participants. Findings suggest that the effectiveness of peace journalism interventions rely on minority-majority relations in ethnic asymmetries with power imbalances. This experiment also advances role-playing experiments as a methodology that opens avenues to explore questions among inaccessible populations and/or volatile environments.