Media as an Instrument for Mitigating Tribal-Based Conflicts: Reviewing Perceptions of Journalists, Human Rights Activists, and Lawyers

Abstract

The media's portrayal of ethnic conflicts in Sudan influences the levels of enmity and peace; yet existing investigations have mainly drawn on a few descriptive case studies, which almost entirely ignore the situations of journalists, human rights workers, and lawyers, and have only occasionally resorted to quantitative methods. This research work investigates the extent to which a combination of media framing, media accessibility and reach, and media credibility and trust could predict the mitigation of tribal conflicts as practiced by Sudanese journalists, human rights defenders, and lawyers. A cross-sectional survey design was used with a sample selected from 120 Sudanese journalists, human rights activists, and lawyers who had very close, hands-on professional experience with tribal conflict reporting. The data were collected by questionnaire in five parts, which have been validated; a Likert scale of 5 points was used for the measurement of media framing, accessibility, credibility, reduction of hate speech, as well as inter-tribal dialogue, and then analyzed using Cronbach's alpha, correlation, and multiple regression in SPSS. The three variables taken together explain over a third (30.3%) of the mitigation of tribal conflicts, significantly and jointly (R² = .303; F(3, 116) = 16.848, p < .001). Trust and credibility in media were the most powerful predictor (β = .407, p < .001), followed by framing in the media (β = .271, p = .001) and accessibility and reach of the media (β = .156, p = .048); the collinearity diagnostics indicated no presence of multicollinearity among the predictors.