Media Culture of War
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 3 Feb 2025
David Adams | Transition to a Culture of Peace – TRANSCEND Media Service
28 Jan 2025 – Since the major news media give headline news every day to reports from the many wars that are taking place, it is easy to say that they are part of the culture of war. I like to say that CNN, with its “situation room” (war room) is actually CWNN, the Culture of War News Network, the opposite of my own news network, CPNN, the Culture of Peace News Network. I suppose that CNN has a special department that prepares background information for present and future wars, just as they prepare obituaries for famous people to be ready in advance of competing media when their deaths occur.
As for television documentaries, you might think it is a good thing living here in France to have many television programs that document wars. But there are very few documentaries about those who are working for peace.
In fact, we are flooded with news and documentaries about war to such an extent that we come to think that war is the natural state of Homo Sapiens. This is despite the face that most of us regarding these television programs are living in communities where there is little violence and where the dominant mode of life is cooperation.
While UNICEF finds that 1 in 6 children now live in war zones, we can also interpret the data to mean that 5 in 6 children live in zones where there is no war!
What if the same proportion were applied to news and documentaries? 5 out of 6 devoted to the processes of peace instead of war !
And when we examined the scientific evidence in 1986 in Seville, we found that human evolution, like the evolution of most animals is marked primarily by cooperation rather than violence. And we concluded, with Margaret Mead, that “the same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace.”
Do those who work in the mass media, the reporters, the writers, the management, realize that they are agents of the culture of war? Or do they simply go about their daily work as they have done for more than a century? Back in 1883, the founder of the Reuters news agency demanded that his staff concentrate on stories of violence since he claimed that it would attract more readers.
At CPNN, we give the opposite information, that people around the world are working every day for a culture of peace. But the hundreds of people who read CPNN regularly are tiny compared to the millions who read or listen or watch the major mass media and their news and documentaries of war.
Can this change?
If the present political and economic system, dominated by the American Empire, comes crashing down, can there be a change in the media by which people are informed?
I continue to maintain CPNN each day in the hope that somehow such a change will come.
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Dr. David Adams is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network. He retired in 2001 from UNESCO where he was the Director of the Unit for the UN International Year for the Culture of Peace. Previously, at Yale and Wesleyan Universities, he was a specialist on the brain mechanisms of aggressive behavior, the history of the culture of war, and the psychology of peace activists, and he helped to develop and publicize the Seville Statement on Violence. Send him an email.
Go to Original – decade-culture-of-peace.org
Tags: CNN, Corporate Media, Culture of Peace, Culture of War, Mainstream Media MSM, Media, Peace Journalism, War Journalism
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