War And Peace Journalism: Evaluating the Media Coverage of Afghan Conflicts

Abstract

This research examines media contents in Afghanistan's conflict-ridden environment using the categories of war and peace journalism.The study offers a 100 days quantitative analysis of the coverage of IS-K, the US, and SRF conflicts in the two Afghan (Tolo News, Ariana News) and one US (Azadi Radio) leading media outlet, from 15 August to 21 November 2021. For examining the designed two hypotheses, 280 reports were collected from the three leading media. Consistent with the existing literature on Peace and war journalism studies, the study found that all the three media outlets predominantly reported the IS-K, US, and SRF conflicts in Afghanistan through war journalism. More focus of media in the coverage of IS-K conflict was on reporting the visible effect of war, and they followed the zero-sum orientation of war journalism. In the coverage of the US and SRF conflict, the selected media reported the elite’s people as the main peacemakers in these conflicts and didn’t pay much attention to the public. For better understanding, this research advocates on the peace journalism scholarship to identify that the media content can play an effective role in peace and conflict resolution.