The Edward R. Murrow School of Communication
Susan Dente Ross
Mediating Global Peace and Security by Constructing an International Journalism of Reconciliation

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Dr. Susan Ross is part of an emerging network of two dozen international scholars who seek to transform journalism from practices that escalate conflict to strategies that advance peace. Westernized news media claim to serve the public responsibly; yet they have failed to advance global peace. Media’s dominant focus on conflict magnifies antagonism and hostility. Norms that encourage ethnocentrism increase perceptions of difference among social, ethnic, and religious groups within and outside national borders. News that echoes and amplifies the views of political elites often builds group unity by demonizing others, exploiting fear, generating hatred, and escalating disagreements into armed combat. Today, intractable interethnic and religious disputes—not imperialist strategies and aspirations—are the harbingers of war.

Well-established scholarship demonstrates that mass media set the public agenda and encourage pro-violence attitudes because they support perceptions that war solves threats to personal identity and security. This scholarship is a point of departure for an international team of researchers committed to:

• improving public understanding of how to reduce violent conflict;
• encouraging critical reading of the media that exacerbate violence and insecurity;
• placing peace and compromise, not war or conflict, atop the media and public agenda;
• enhancing knowledge of how media perform global politics and international relations;
• increasing the legitimacy of peacemakers and public and media support for peacemaking;
• providing models and materials to improve teaching and training of journalists;
• helping transform modern journalism norms and practice to support non-violent resolution of conflict;
• promoting media coverage that prompts political actors to embrace nonviolence;
• developing deeper study of peace journalism within a broadening and more integrated network of scholarship and faculty/student exchange; and
• decreasing the prevalence of war and increasing global peace.

Contact Information
Susan Ross, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
The Edward R. Murrow School of Communication

Washington State University
PO Box 2520
Pullman, WA 99164-2520

Telephone: 509-335-5842
E-mail: suross@wsu.edu