War or peace journalism? Kenyan newspaper framing of 2007 post-election violence

Abstract

This study sought to examine the dominant frame in terms of ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in the coverage of the 2007/2008 post-election violence. At the time, Kenya had eight daily and over 10 weekly newspapers (Mbeke, 2008). The Daily Nation and The Standard were selected for the purpose of this study. The study applied systematic sampling method to select stories from The Standard and simple random sampling to select the stories from Daily Nation. A sample of 35 news articles (an average of 5 every day) for each of the newspapers and a maximum of 10 for each of the other categories were selected from 294 and 180 articles from The Standard and Daily Nation respectively. Details of each story were recorded in the coding sheet. This information was afterwards transferred to SPSS, a statistical data analysis programme. The study employs 11 of Johan Galtung’s 13 indicators of war/peace journalism to analyse the framing of the conflict. Galtung has proposed a new approach to reporting war and conflict that he terms 'peace journalism'. The two newspapers had an equal number of war journalism-framed stories (6 or 2%). Peace journalism framing was dominant in both newspapers. The findings contrast Galtung’s argument that in reporting war and conflict the media always give emphasis to war journalism frames.