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Introduction:
Jannie Botes, a South African at the University of Baltimore, observes that media mediation takes place "a million times a day all over the world," but people don't recognize it or its importance.
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The Ubiquity of the Media Mediation Model
Jannie Botes
Assistant Professor, Program on Negotiations and Conflict Management, University of Baltimore
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...People have said to me, "You know, yeah, but it's Nightline and
Ted Koppel. There aren't many examples of that."
I really completely
disagree with that and the reason I do... I have two reasons. One, the model of the
journalist
moderator sitting and interviewing two parties in a conflict is repeated a
million times a day over the world, on radio, on television and it's also
repeated in print in an indirect way. In print, you don't have the people it right in
front of you, but in print you go to these people and say, you speak to party A,
you speak to party B and then you call party A back and say well party B says
such and such. So you can see that same dialectic between party A and B and how
in a sense the journalist either pulled comparisons or huge differences between
them. Maybe the big difference is that journalists and the media kind of thrive
on differences whereas we as third parties and peacemakers and facilitators and mediators
certainly thrive on trying to point out points of agreement in the facilitative
model. Therefore the reason I think that it is really important to look at that
way is that model is repeated everywhere, in small towns, in large towns, in
radio, in TV, and I think the model exists in print as well.
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