Peace Journalism: Media Coverage of Social Protests in Colombia in 2021

Despite some criticism, peace journalism has received considerable attention over the last three decades as a normative approach to promote a more conscientious, contextualized, and proactive journalistic approach to reporting conflict. This study aims at examining the media coverage of the social protests of Colombia in 2021 using peace journalism as a theoretical framework. A sample of 210 news stories from April 28 to June 10 of 2021 were analyzed to see how two Colombian newspapers reflected Galtung’s framework of peace journalism and see variations over time and between media sources. Given that most of the research on the operationalization of peace journalism has examined militaristic armed conflicts, this analysis seeks to expand the research exploring war/peace journalism media framing in the context of social protests. The results cannot fully confirm previous studies that have identified a predominance of war journalism framing in media coverage; although at the individual indicator level there is a clear inclination towards war journalism, considering a holistic assessment, there is a tendency towards peace journalism. These results suggest theoretical and practical implications that must be addressed for the refinement of peace journalism as a journalistic practice.