Conflict Reporting: Stakeholders call for change in media role

By Matthew Eloyi

Stakeholders in the media have called for a shift in the media’s role to address structural flaws in insurgency coverage and promote peacebuilding in the country.

This was revealed at a one-day workshop on Reframing Media Studies of Crime, Insurgencies, and Counter-Terrorism in Nigeria on Wednesday in Abuja.

The Peace and Conflict Journalism Research Centre (PAJOREC) in partnership with the University of Manitoba, Canada, hosted the workshop.

Prof. Muhammad Yusuf, Director of PAJOREC, stated that media practitioners must avoid all sorts of sentimental opinions, especially while reporting on conflicts.

According to him, the workshop will develop some types of research on how to report and analyze conflicts in the future.

In his words, “The media has done a lot in the coverage of insurgency but why is the coverage not helping to phase out these problems, those are the question we want to find out from this workshop.

“It is also a key question and how the media can be covering conflicts and are there possibility that our sentiments are playing out in the way we cover insurgency and how can we change that?

“How can we be dispassionate completely, not emotionally attached to what we are giving to insurgency and conflict after putting all the report together.

“We have many countries that their media have done different things in reporting conflicts like Algeria, they have suffered more than Nigeria.”

According to Yusuf, the workshop will produce a comprehensive research that will be analyzed to determine how to encompass the concept of war insurgency.

The Vice Chancellor of Baze University, Prof. Mamman Tahir, praised the University of Manitoba for its ongoing collaboration with the university.

Tahir, on the other hand, was optimistic that the relationship will be expanded to other academic areas between the two universities.

Prof. Russell Smandych, Lead Researcher at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Sociology and Criminology, stated the study has been ongoing for three years.

Since 1999, a group of researchers has been conducting a detailed review of media coverage of crime and terrorism in the country, according to Smandych.

He explained that the workshop’s goal was to acquire up-to-date information on the role of the media, especially social media, in promoting peace in the country.

It was reported that the workshop participants agreed that ownership, culture, and religion issues are the scourge of reporting conflicts.

They claimed that the inextricability of friendship and politics, as well as the political policy framework, had resulted in ethnic champions being portrayed in the media.