However, if we accept that conflict is an acceptable part of human life and a key feature of healthy, agonistic democracies, then the questions about media, conflict and democracy can also be turned around: We can ask how this relationship can become productive. How can an analysis of media, conflict and democracy help us understand wider claims made by media about their role and place in society?
Professor Herman Wasserman, from his book “The Ethics of Engagement”
Introduction and focus of the essay
These are apocalyptic times for traditional media houses and their business models. From a range of technological challenges to social media innovations, from credibility and management mistakes to sweeping socio-political changes we are witnessing a profession on the edge of drastic systemic changes, or even existential problems.
Much of the current perfect storm of problems faced by the media has been self-inflicted. These arguments and debates are receiving a fair amount of attention and scrutiny, including of course from within the industry itself, and I do not intend revisiting any of those arguments here. With retrenchments and precipitous drops in income, profitability and even viability concerns and the confident refrain worldwide that social media users “are the media now” and that “msm is dead” I do not add anything to the debate by simply repeating those talking points.
The premise of the article is a simple one, and sets up a topic that is close to my heart, for various reasons. I argue that the classical, traditional media, stripped of outdated and harmful practices and models, and enhanced by new strategies and business models is a common good, a tradition far too valuable to destroy or cast aside, and that a new and improved main stream media, viable and profitable, is in the manifest best interest of society at this stage, as it faces its own disruptive age I want to further refine this premise by looking at the present and future state of the media through the lens of conflict – the conflicts that they have mismanaged as an industry, the conflicts that brought them here, and then a few conflict strategies that they can consider using in their fight for survival, relevance and renewal. If you have read any of my published work you will recall that I am of the view that most, if not all, of human engagement has various levels of conflict running through it like a golden thread.
Conflict as manifest, open hostility, as clashes of interest, as commercial competition, as a battle for time, resources and loyalty, as necessary manifestations of our identities and those resultant conflicts, and it is this wide and modern view of what conflict entails that I will be using in our discussion.
A few working definitions
For purposes of our discussion, I use “media” in its popular, wide sense of that word, a generalized “mainstream media” if you will. Where necessary to distinguish or be more precise, I will do so. As indicated earlier, I ask that we adopt a wide and dynamic understanding of conflict itself. Two friends or colleagues that respect each other but still compete for market share or a specific position at a news-desk are in conflict with each other, and we impoverish our options and solutions if we hold too narrow and outdated a view of what qualifies as modern conflict.
Ethical considerations
In this analysis I am forced to, from time to time, take certain moral and ethical positions in order to assess and recommend certain conflict strategies. For example, I do not believe, and will argue the point later on, that it is not ethical of media providers to irresponsibly cause conflict in a community without certain checks and balances, and that this is easy to track and predict when we use conflict as a lens to assess such conduct. A particular media house may diametrically oppose such a view, arguing that “simply reporting” allegations rife in that community is their job, and that this is their brand, their way of surviving in a social media circus world. I have no interest in preaching to professionals on this, but understand that where our ethical foundations differ too much, our assessments and conclusions in approaching the problems and solutions as conflict puzzles may very well differ markedly.
The use of modern conflict principles and strategies are not necessarily dependent on ethical worldviews and steering principles, but any purposeful or unintended recalibration of what is a very nuanced machine could have adverse consequences.
We then start the essence of our discussion by having a look at conflicts that the media have generally mismanaged, dealt with unskillfully, or ignored. Here again I have no interest in conveying these comments as criticism. It is however trite modern practice in conflict management to comprehensively understand the problem before designing the solution, and it is in this sense that these reflections are offered.
Mismanaged conflicts
An important reason for my defensiveness and concerns about the media industry may very well stem from an emotional attachment to the industry. The crackle and smell of newspapers, the ubiquitous presence of these tangible reminders of daily news and information and the role it played in my family and professional development are simply more than memories, they are indelible parts of my being, of my world as I know it.
Much of that is pure nostalgia, reminders of a time that cannot, and should not, be preserved in the amber of our memories. That is nevertheless where, I believe, our search for mismanaged conflicts in the history of the media should start. The media was simply too big to fail, too important a part of everyone’s daily lives to lose, or even for it to be harmed beyond recognition. The parameters of the crisis as it is understood today would not have made much sense to me thirty years ago, I would have regarded such a debate as fanciful conjecture and a topic bordering on fictional assumptions. And yet, here we are.
Internally, that confidence, that sense of security, of being untouchable, obviously set the course for so many of the long list of management failures that we now see so clearly in the rear-view mirror. A potentially fatal list of conflicts, from marketing to assessing the competition, from the values of its readership, from supply and demand, internal quality control, responses to mistakes and so many more, the media industry simply did not see much of these results coming timeously, or if we study some of the comments and opinions of today, still do not understand the importance and mechanics of these conflicts. Just about every category of modern conflict studies and practice has been misunderstood, ignored or mismanaged.
The media has for decades regarded itself as an industry sui generis, as observing other peoples’ conflicts, missing or mismanaging the simple fact that it will have its own global and local, internal and external conflicts to master. Even where this observable fact was acknowledged in time, it was generally handled in an ad hoc, disorganized, outdated and dismissive way. Successions of boards, managers and experts dealt with complex conflicts by addressing the symptoms of such conflicts, blissfully unaware of the causes of such conflicts, ineffectively trying to keep their fingers in the dykes of chaos by using faddish management Band-Aids, litigation, retrenchments and other cost-cutting as solutions. From a conflict assessment report perspective, many of the purported solutions to these conflicts, even where the manifestations where even understood and dealt with as conflicts, simply contributed to the complexity and intractability of the problems. Even today we see no discernible improvement in moving towards using the conflict framework as a way out of these crises.
Strategies and solutions are still cobbled together in the ever-so-popular Whack A Mole style, lurching from forest fire to dumpster fire, not seeing or not understanding the cycles and causes that the correct lens will bring into view. Conflicts which were inherently complex and harmful of their own accord were exacerbated by poor conflict knowledge and management into cyclical problems that became more daunting with every doomed strategy used against it.
From clients and friends in the media industry, here and abroad, I have not managed to find any meaningful trace (in any decade over the last thirty or forty years) of an institutional understanding that management, boards, decision-makers and journalists themselves need to be trained in tailor-made conflict skills. An industry that walks through the flames of conflict by definition, never realised that they need to be skilled at the very thing that they are reporting on. We see this in the management decisions that have been made, in the operational trajectories of the last twenty years, and the sheer unpreparedness of even senior and otherwise extremely skilled journalists to understand and make use of conflict as a study and as a practical skill.
Conflicts that have contributed to the present moment
It skews our assessment of these conflicts and the way forward if, like it has become so popular in everyday popular debate, we edit out the global and local conflicts that have contributed to the present state of the media art. The rise of social media, in all its beautiful, powerful, awful chaos could have been better anticipated, better internalized and better managed, but very few professions stood directly in the path of this technological tsunami as did the media industry. The competition was never fair, and the fact that a radicalized, barely literate teenager with a smartphone can now get more attention on TikTok than a seasoned Pulitzer winning journalist is not a bug in the system, it is a feature. Add to these winds of change the advent of any realistic understanding of artificial intelligence and its role and effect on the worldwide media, and it is clear that the media industry was always going to be facing headwinds at this stage in its history. But these technological challenges, in my view, are counter-intuitively some of the more productive challenges, and an urgent, informed response to such conflicts can actually be a part of the rescue strategy of the media profession. Given that personal conclusion I regard that aspect as a related but different topic, one that I have comprehensively discussed in my book Hamlet’s Mirror: Conflict and Artificial Intelligence (see reference section below).
A few suggested modern conflict strategies for media practitioners
Failing to see the golden thread of conflict running though these thousands of problems and debates of the last few decades severely limits the possible responses and solutions. Dealing with these storms as an unconnected rain of problems, challenges of the economy and laws and changed cultural practices and technology and so on is an awful conflict strategy, as we can see from the scoreboard of history. For those willing and able to see the future challenges through the overarching lens of human conflict, the following strategies become available. I briefly mention only a few.
1. Re-assess the role of conflict in your world
Try to expand your view of what conflict is. A modern understanding of conflict shows that it runs through our professional and personal lives like a golden thread, as much as we may want to water it down, or stick more polite labels on it. Competition, profitability, brand management, continued education, supply chains, research, funding, managing service providers, patient care….all of these run on potential conflict. Anywhere in human endeavour where people’s interests are, or may potentially become, at loggerheads should be approached as conflict arenas. This does not require you to be aggressive or combative, quite the opposite is true, but it does need you to stop treating the symptoms of these crucial areas and start understanding, and dealing with, the causes of the outcomes that you want improved.
2. Invest in some conflict training
Modern conflict management (under which imprecisely used term I include conflict management, resolution and transformation) has in recent years become a multi-disciplinary field of study and practice, completely distinguishable from the position a decade or two ago, with its general “why can’t we all get along” approaches. Effective conflict skills lead to conflict confidence, and this in turn leads to measurable conflict outcomes. It is here where the media profession stand to benefit from various levels of coaching and training, from institutional to team to individual levels. Here I advise tailor-made programs, designed not for general application, but for industry and specific application. These programs can range from formal study to long-distance courses, seminars and workshops, team and individual coaching and encompassing all of the direct and indirect aspects of a particular media house or unit.
3. Do some work on conflict persuasion as a journalistic tool
With these expanded views of the relevance and application of conflict skills, and its clear benefits, come the further realization that persuading people, whether it is to gain access to a person or records, in the way that we write our reports, in shaping a community’s views and so on is its own complex level of conflict, and here again modern conflict management enables the practitioner, through skills relevant to inter alia nonverbal communication, identity conflicts and micro-sociology (to name but a few), to persuade others, and to prevent, guide, minimize or improve conflict outcomes. We can all benefit from being more persuasive when we need it, and the observable fact that the media profession remains so disinterested in these available tools remains difficult to understand.
4. Expand your media management or journalistic skills by adding advanced conflict tools
The upgrading of an individual or team’s conflict skills can, to an extent, be done through personal study and with minimal expenditure of time. This in itself constitutes an improvement in the conflict skills of such people, and is to be supported even at the most basic of levels. Any improvement in an important life skill is to be applauded and encouraged. But individuals or teams can also decide to increase such conflict skill levels, through the mechanisms and options mentioned above, and here the results are even more dramatic and rewarding. Knowledge of, and the application in professional or personal conflicts, of concepts such as conflict escalation and de-escalation, timing and sequence, the many strategies of complex conflicts, understanding and managing grievances in conflict, complex systems thinking in conflicts and so much more again can only bring benefit during your career.
Media management will, in a relatively short space of time, see new levers and pulleys in complex situations, the behaviour of opponents and competitors will become easier to anticipate and manage, and measurably better outcomes will be produced. Journalists themselves will have greatly improved insight into the actions of protagonists in a story, and this improved insight into motive and method will undoubtedly reflect positively in written work and presentations, on air and in preparation.
Democracy itself, as we understand it at present, is being changed and threatened on levels that would require an advanced knowledge of several conflict related skills, from conflict itself to technology, how opinion is shaped and steered and as serious and urgent a threat as this poses to democratic governments, it also presents a wonderful opportunity to journalists to craft a new level of journalism and rebuild some of its main building blocks, such as integrity and public trust. This will require some work, but it will set the profession apart again, as it was years ago, from the hacks and basement “journalists”.
5. Build conflict management into your brand
Modern consumers clearly have very different expectations of their media content providers, and online and brand battles have become potentially toxic and career ending, if not at least exceptionally harmful to reputation and earnings. Again, this is not its own separate category – understand conflict and you understand the levers and buttons of these modern minefields, and you know how to successfully navigate them. The benefits are immediate and gradual. Once people start experiencing media content as knowledgeable and as adding something to their consumption of news that “social media journalists” cannot provide they will start rebuilding their own respect for the profession, and come back as new clients. A specialist level of understanding, anticipating and explain the conflict inherent in the news of the day is such an easy and indispensable point of focus for any modern strategy that the media considers and implements.
6. Streamline your internal practice processes
These benefits extend to your staff and colleagues. A team that understands conflict at an above-average level can see, prevent and handle operational and structural problems on an advanced level, again a result simply from an expanded view of what conflict is and entails.
7. Include identity conflicts in your journalistic practice
I have written about this often. We cannot meaningfully understand, and report on, modern professional, political or personal conflict unless we have an unusually high level of understanding of modern identity conflicts (please note: this is not the same as identity politics). With these complex keys at your disposal many of those seemingly irrational and intractable global or local conflicts make sense, and you can reflect and write on them in a way that few of your colleagues and none of the informal media can compete with. This will take a bit of work, but so does learning to ride a bicycle…and the measurable results of this life skill is worth the time and effort. These are often counter-intuitive observations that are heavily backed by a range of modern scientific disciplines, and they are all there to benefit you in your practice.
Conversely, and again painful evident from most modern journalistic reporting, without this conflict skill reporting on these conflicts can, at best, be superficial and incomplete, to put it politely.
Conclusion
Our brief examination and development of the premise of this essay has, hopefully, brought most of us to a place where we return to a wiser, more realistic and more confident assessment of the future of the media profession. I continue to hold to the belief that an ethical, skilled and professional journalistic class will always be a better tool on which to build or rebuild society than an untrained body of “citizen journalists”, as important a minor role such latter group can of course play. The tools and the maps are there. I hope you find your way out of this mess.
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading
1. Dangerous Magic: essays on conflict resolution in South Africa, by Andre Vlok, Paradigm Media (2022)
2. Hamlet’s Mirror: conflict and artificial intelligence, by Andre Vlok, Paradigm Media (2023) deals extensively with the threats, potential and strategies arising from AI in the media profession.
3. The Ethics of Engagement: media, conflict and democracy in South Africa, by Herman Wasserman, Oxford University Press (2021)
4. Relevant articles (including my future work on this subject) for your consideration and their source material can be found at www.conflict-conversations.co.za
(Andre Vlok can be contacted on andre@conflictresolutioncentre.co.za for any further information)
(c) Andre Vlok
November 2024