Analysis Of The Journalism Of Attachment

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Other than that, there is no doubt that Journalism of Attachment is very persuasive, but it is criticized for only focusing on human-interest stories, consequently giving less attention to the bigger picture. Karoline von Oppen (2009, p. 10) argues “that paradoxically the Journalism of Attachment made us all bystanders to an alien war which meant that we could absolve all responsibility for its origins and representations” as these human-interest stories only serve to function as a desensitizing apparatus, until the audiences accept that the only solution is military solution (von Oppen 2009) or known as ‘humanitarian intervention’. And as mentioned above, such examples from the past has clearly shown how prominent news network would manipulate news to win audiences over. But in Martin Bell’s defence, it was due to the 1991 Gulf War where the focus was mainly on weaponry and military strategies, so he had to change the focus of the mainstream media towards a more humane approach.

For an example on how these human-interest stories on desensitize, a former BBC Africa correspondent, George Alagiah, reported on famines, especially in a small town of Tonji. In his first news report, he was sure to include in pictures of what famine looks like so that the audiences would identify and recognize it, and for his second, he included interviews from prominent figures, which he thought was more insightful. But the response he got after was that people only remembered the first news report. Alagiah believes that human rights is an absolute truth and demands that the audiences understand, “but he is aware that this is not at all what his audiences seem to do, instead of adopting a rigorous ethical stance, his audiences and listeners instead...

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...a frenzy, but “if either side had paid more attention to conflict issues, their reporting would have been more accurate” (Lynch 2007, p. 9).

Other critics like Thomas Hanitzsch is often found to disagree with the notion of peace journalism. Galtung accuses the traditional views of journalism to be distorting reality, but paradoxically here as well, peace journalism shifts the focus of its news from the bigger picture to a definitive problem (Hanitzsch 2005). Similar to von Oppen and Loyn, Hanitzsch argues that the chain of events created by a peace journalist could actively be contrary. Hanitzsch gives an example from two Indonesian newspaper who chose to skip reports on the Ambon conflict, because if they did not, the report could have sparked emotions on support or violent groups, which consequently making the newspapers themseves under threat (Hanitzsch 2005).

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