Conflict Reporting Strategies and the Identities of Ethnic and Religious Communities in Jos, Nigeria

Book excerpt: This book examines journalistic strategies in terms of the appropriation of media logics in the conflict frame-building process. Relying on three models (objectivity, mediatisation and news framing), it interrogates the role orientations and performance of journalists who reported the conflict involving the ‘indigenous’ Christians and Hausa Fulani Muslim ‘settlers’ of Jos, a city in North Central Nigeria inhabited by approximately one million people. The book provides empirical evidence of the strategies and the representations of ethnic and religious identities in the conflict narratives focusing on the most-cited and vicious conflicts in Jos which occurred in 2001, 2008 and 2010. Thus, mediatised conflict research is revisited, placing media logics at the heart of the conflict. The text proposes Solutions-Review Journalism (SRJ) as a framework for conflict reporting, and argues that a review process is necessary to measure impact.