Peace Journalism and its Values in Iran; The News Coverage of Coalition to Iraq by Six Iranian Widely Circulated Dailies

This research explains "peace journalism" which is regarded as a new concept in worldwide journalism literature. The main goal of this research will help to explain and promote the level of theoretical literature of peace journalism. To this end, the indicators and values of this kind of journalism are defined to evaluate how much six large circulation newspapers applied the said standards during the war between coalition forces and Iraqi military force. The research is based on the Galtung theory and four main approaches of peace journalism (Solution-oriented approach, Process-oriented approach, Truth-oriented approach and People-oriented approach) and we have added two key principles in journalism: professional and moral standards. The researchers assume that interaction between those four approaches and the two principles could lead to sustainable peace for newspapers. After figuring out and explaining the values and approaches of peace journalism by content analysis, the study shows that the above newspapers didn’t applied the four mentioned approaches. In fact, the newspapers paid more attention on people-oriented. Having cultural proximity with Iraq, the Iranian newspapers used people-oriented approach during the war. In other word, the six daily papers just reflected the “innocence of Iraqi people” during the war and the other war dimensions were less addressed by them. Thus, these newspapers had not any correspondent in Iraq to coverage the war news; instead, descriptive reports, analytic and investigative reports were published.