Abstract
With the intercession of the new media, individuals were able to write news and publish videos through their participations on Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This article is centered on citizen journalism which comes from the participation of citizens in making news. The main purpose of this article is to show the relationship between citizen journalism and mainstream journalism in covering Syrian news, and how peace journalism represents in both. A questionnaire designed to analyze the content of five Syrian events on Aljazeera news channel. The five Syrian events are Al-Bayda and Baniyas, the siege of Bab Amr, al Qusair and Khalidiya in Homs, Yarmouk camp, chemical on Al Gota. Result shows that Aljazeera uses a significant number of footages and contents which came from Syrian citizen journalists; it is presented as 46.3 %. Due to shared political agendas between Aljazeera and citizen journalists, Aljazeera depends on their footages more than their own reporters while they are covering Syrian news. Majority of footages reflect Syrian opposition and the killing of Syrians which resulted from Al-Assad Regime. We suggest that news content published by citizen journalists on their blogs and YouTube should be analyzed for other studies.
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Notes
Peace Frame includes peaceful marches, Syrian’s suffering, Syrians death doll so on..
Conflict Frame includes violent clashes, killing and blood between both Al Assad and his opposition, movements of the parties so on.
Goffman (1974) first used the concept of frame analysis. Tuchman (1978) applied Goffman’s frame analysis to news reporting and he is arguing that news reporting frames organize everyday reality.
Peace journalism was founded by Johan Galtung in the 1960’s; however the popularity of this concept began in the 1990’s with the first Gulf War..
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Khasib, N., Ersoy, M. Citizen, mainstream and peace journalism relationship in covering Syria events: a content analysis of Aljazeera. Qual Quant 51, 2647–2664 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-016-0413-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-016-0413-3