Time for a New News Approach - News with solutions, ideas, anything..?

I am graduate student studying Conflict Anaylsis and Resolution just outside of my nation's capital, Washington, DC. I love the program, but one of its unintended consequences has been my hightended frustration with how ‘news’ is reported.

Here is an example of what I mean:

In a recent BBC article entitled, “Battle Looms at Hebron house,” Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians verbally fight it out in Hebron. WOW! Thanks BBC! We had no idea that Palestinians and Jews fight in Hebron!!! Here is how this groundbreaking story unfolded..

Israeli Jewish Settler statements from the article:

"This is our land," reads a hand-scrawled sign on the door.

Local Palestinians say the young men (Israeli Jewish settlers) throw stones at them, ratcheting up tensions in the town where several hundred settlers, known as particularly hard-line, live in heavily-guarded enclaves amid some 150,000 Palestinians.

To many of these settlers, it is crucial for both religious and security reasons to maintain a Jewish presence in the West Bank, where much Jewish Biblical history was played out.

Ground-breaking Palestinian statements included:

Feelings run high on the Palestinian side too - on one of the videos a Palestinian woman screams repeatedly "we will stay until death".

"Every single house and every single stone is important for us… because it is our land"

The article goes on to give some background on Hebron and why it’s fought over:

"Hebron is holy to both Jews and Muslims as the site of the cave that bought as a burial site for his wife Sarah.”

In the concluding remarks of the article, it informed the reader that admist all this fighting political elections were coming soon in Israel. A statement that really drives home why this fighting is so problematic:

General elections are due in February 2009, and the presence of 450,000 Israelis in settlements in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, is an emotive issue.

Here is what is missing from the article: SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE. If it is logical to say that people get informed about the world around them by the news they consume, then wouldn’t it be a good idea to offer a baseline to begin fixing the problems that plague our world?

Example:



Want to learn more?

Here are some of the organizations of the peacemakers you saw featured in this video:
1) Jerusalem Peacemakers
2) The Sulha Peace Project