Abstract:

The paper hypothesizes and empirically analyzes a linguistic theory of media peacebuilding through the study of the continuum between hate speech and hope speech in international news reports about four armed conflicts: The Afghanistan War (2001-2021), the Russia-Ukraine War (2014-2017), the Libya War (2011), and the Russia-Georgia War (2008). Based on the peace/war journalism model by Galtung and Ruge (1965), the framing theory presented by Entman (1993), and the new body of research on the topic of hate speech and harmful language (Benesch, 2014; Benesch et al., 2020), the research is a systematic comparative content analysis of n = 940 news articles in 30 international and Findings show that the war-violence framing is dominant in all four conflicts (mean = 65.4%), but there is a great difference between the global Northern media, non-western media, and local/host country media. The highest levels of peace-oriented framing were found in Pajhwok Afghan News (96%), Xinhua News Agency (72%), and TASS (Russia-Ukraine) and Al Jazeera (Russia-Georgia) had the greatest levels of war-oriented framing (96% and 96%, respectively). To near perfection, interrater reliability was significant among coders (Cohen κ = .785, mean agreement = 88.7%). The research paper presents a seven-dimensional Hope Speech Typology based on the dichotomous framework by Galtung that operationalises certain linguistic indicators between peacebuilding speech and dehumanising, conflict-escalating speech. The theoretical implications of these findings are that democratisation of war reporting and practical implications are the newsroom training and media literacy programmes in conflict-affected societies.