Media framing of peace and war news: a comparative study between Malaysian TV stations and the global media / Faridah Ibrahim

In the 1990s we witnessed wars via the mass media; death of thousands in
several warring states and millions in others. We also witnessed numerous
acts of terrorism for instance 9/11 in America, the 7/7 bomb blast in the British
capital and several bomb blast in Malaysian neighboring country, Indonesia.
In the midst of these happenings, are the media, both local and global, doing
their best to cover the news for the benefits of their audiences locally or
worldwide. As for the local media, and in this case the news broadcast, one
may ask how does a country such as Malaysia, that does not experience war,
report other peoples’ war? With Malaysia’s over dependence of war news from
the international news agencies and global media, will the news by Malaysian
broadcast media differ from those that are covered by the global media, due to
news slant and editors’ preferences? Moreover with the potential of the mass
media to provide neutral and objective reporting of war and peace, one may
ask, how do these local and global media propagate peace? For that matter,
is peace journalism an option for these media. This study engages in a
comparative study on the coverage of war and peace news between two
Malaysian television stations, TV3 and RTM with two global television
networks, CNN and Al-Jazeera. Using a quantitative content analysis study
with Smetko and Valkenburg’s framing theory as the theoretical platform, the
study hopes to identify to what extent these four selected media are involved
in propagating world peace.