Browsing by Author "Green, Lesley Fordred"
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- ItemRestrictedRaconteur, Jester, Listener, Survivor: Khaba Mkhize's strategies for conflict-reducing journalism in KwaZulu, South Africa(2003) Green, Lesley FordredConflicts polarise people's worlds. In seeking to perpetuate the illusion of objectivity, news journalists narrate conflicts by reducing them to binaries and encouraging polemical debates between them. Yet such a strategy actively foments the fissioning of the world. While media scholarship has learned to be cautious of attributing excessive power to the media at the expense of audiences' agencies, the news media retains tremendous power. This is particularly so in situations where violence at the local level becomes shocking and difficult to explain. In contexts where there is urgent need for defensiveness if not retaliation, the power of journalist to make narrative connections that rouse people to greater levels of anger becomes very great. Texts describing today's sentiments easily become scripts for tomorrow's battle scenes.