Risk, Crisis and Conflict Communication

Historiography has significantly neglected the presence of foreign women journalists in the Civil War, ignoring information about the conflict with nuances clearly differentiated from the dominant narrative. However, nearly two hundred women testified to their passage through the Iberian Peninsula, more interested in the effects of war than military culture. Most of them were in Barcelona and focused, among other aspects, on life in the city, the aerial bombing of the civilian population, the bloody events of May 1937 and the departure of the Republicans towards France.

Climate change is a risk and a transdisciplinary, pragmatic and constitutive communication phenomenon. From risk to crisis or emergency to disaster, this article offers a critical overview, given the explosion of this issue among and between communities of social scientists. Focused on the dilemmas in risk and environmental communication or disaster risk reduction, climate change communication is suggested as a point of confluence, a key to turning knowledge into action. Ideas communicated about climate change become the means of anticipating and expressing the future in our present.  

The present study is the first ever attempt to discern if peace journalism, by far the most well-known in media studies for being largely devoted to media portrayals of external conflicts between nations, could be applied to the Indian media in the context of expanding Indian journalism since globalization. The study is also the first ever approach to shed light on India’s past ethos, drawn from its spiritual texts and discourses, and to delineate the long history of Indian journalism (Murthy, 2010; 2017) which constantly violated the practice of peace advocated in the ancient Indian spiritual texts. Adopting a multi-perspectival approach combining both hermeneutics and discourse methods as applicable to interviews, the study elicited answers to an unstructured questionnaire from some prominent Southern journalists. The findings suggest that the Indian journalists’ view of ‘peace journalism’, contrary to how it was understood to sound in the West, is not relevant to Indian journalism by scope, definition, and extent.

The results of this study show that the government’s communication strategy has certain shortcomings, such as the high presence of assumptions and contradictions. Likewise, themes like the constant update of deaths and hospitalisations are prioritised, as well as news related to the State Security Forces and Corps. In order to analyse the general  features of the government’s communication strategy, the press conferences of the Technical Management Committee for the coronavirus and the president of the Spanish Executive during the first few weeks of the state of alarm were watched with the goal of studying to what extent they follow the recommendations of crisis communication and to determine the main themes that appear.

During the spring of 2022, we interviewed different public workers responsible for managing the Covid-19 infodemic, with the aim of documenting and studying how several units of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) acted to mitigate the effects of the infodemic. We then met with representatives of the two main fact-checking organisations in Catalonia to identify how they had responded to the infodemic and what we could learn. This local study allows us to understand the behaviour of the Catalan community and to adapt interventions, as most previous studies are based on the English-speaking community.

The sovereignty process in Catalonia was a political and social movement that defended the right to decide and the independence of this territory, which led to a confrontation between the Spanish state and the Catalan government. The Spanish and Catalan media played a crucial role in the media coverage due to their proximity to the conflict and, at the same time, they were at the centre of the public debate. This research takes TV3 and its journalists as a case study to find out how the political and social context conditioned the journalistic narrative and what external and internal factors intervened. Through semi-structured interviews with eleven journalists, including editors and editors of TV3 news programmes, diverse aspects can be identified that allow us to conclude that the journalistic sources, the work routines and the responsibility of TV3 as a public medium were the main factors that intervened in the news production.