Dealing with the Past: Media & Journalism

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La Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación y los medios de comunicación: Ayacucho y Lima

Antonio Zapata Velasco

Lima: Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst (DED); Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) (2010), 60 pp.

"El presente trabajo nace de un acuerdo entre el DED y el IEP para realizar dos estudios sobre la implementación de las recomendaciones emitidas en el Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación . Este segundo trabajo trata sobre los medios de prensa y el Informe Final de la CVR; h ... more

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Right to memory

Media Development, volume 57, issue 2 (2010), pp. 3-59

"How reliable are the mass media’s stories and images of yesterday let alone of the more remote past? Only by rigorously cross-checking different sources of public or cultural memory might one reach a point that is reasonably balanced and accurate – an exercise in triangulating memory’s ever ... shifting terrain. This, of course, is the essence of positive revisionist history (rather than its negative counterpart, in which one must beware the hidden agendas of politics, ideology, class, gender, and religion.) The notion of a right to memory is, therefore, fraught with difficulty. Whose memories are being sought? How are they to be (re)constructed? How can their veracity, integrity, and credibility be guaranteed? And, in today’s information-sharing societies, what are the relationships between the right to memory, the right to information, and the right to communication? In Cambodia, a cultural unwillingness not to speak ill of the past is confronted by the extreme discomfort of survivors of the Pol Pot regime that killed 1.7 million (one sixth of the population). While the Cambodian government pursues reconciliation based on the political expediency of amnesty, the people’s right to communicate their stories stands precariously on their inability to recover the truth of what happened. In Uruguay a freedom of information law passed in 2008 provides the legal framework for public access to a vast quantity of secret state information pertaining to the country’s military dictatorships. The law clearly stipulates that there can be no restrictions when it comes to investigating violations of human rights. In South Africa, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had completed its work, the essential question was how to generate the will to form restorative relationships that could tackle resentment, bring economic restitution, and forge new political structures that were just and equitable. Restorative relationships require coming to terms with memories that others might wish to forget. In this respect, a litmus test for a right to memory is how it might be used to transcend traumatic events in ways that overcome hatred, fear, guilt, and revenge. How might a right to memory contribute to a more peaceful and sustainable future? And a litmus test for political, social and cultural responses to the questions at the heart of public memory is how critical and balanced they are when issues of power, privilege, and impunity haunt the present. As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, ‘The duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self.’" (Editorial, page 2) more

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Media, Memory, and Human Rights in Chile

Kristin Sorensen

New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2009), x, 186 pp.

"Sorensen investigates the manner in which Chilean media and public culture discuss human rights violations committed during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) as well as human rights problems which still exist." (Publisher description)

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Journalists, war crimes and international justice

Howard Tumber

Media, War & Conflict, volume 1, issue 3 (2008), pp. 261-269

"The examination of the ethical and moral issues surrounding the reporting of war crimes signals one of the outstanding problems facing journalism in the contemporary era. As the nature of war has changed, so has the nature of the journalism mandated to cover it, and the selection of war crimes tria ... more

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Prejudice, Conflict and Media. Reducing Intergroup Prejudice and Conflict Using the Media: A Field Experiment in Rwanda

Elizabeth Levy Paluck

Harvard: Harvard University, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (2007), 64 pp.

"Can the media reduce intergroup prejudice and conflict? Despite the high stakes of this question, understanding of the mass media’s role in shaping prejudiced beliefs, norms, and behaviors is very limited. A year-long field experiment in Rwanda tested the impact of a radio soap opera about two Rw ... more

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Video, War, and the Diasporic Imagination

Dona Kolar-Panov

London; New York: Routledge (1997), xvi, 252 pp.

"Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination is an incisive study of the loss and (re) construction of collective and personal identities in ethnic migrant communities. Focusing on the Croatian and Macedonian communities in Western Australia, Dona Kolar-Panov documents the social and cultural changes t ... more