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Guy Burgess - Mass Media Efforts

Introduction: Guy Burgess, Co-Director of the University of Colorado Conflict Research Consortium and the Beyond Intractability Project, describes Search for Common Ground's mass media efforts in developing countries beset with conflict.


Media Strategies This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

Mass Media Efforts
Guy Burgess
Co-Director of the University of Colorado Conflict Research Consortium and the Beyond Intractability Project
Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

Search for Common Ground has done some very interesting things. They've figured out that costs of mass media productions in third-world countries is miniscule, especially given the new technologies, compared to what you'd expect to spend to make it into the mass TV market in the United States. They've done some fascinating things where they have radio soap operas where they feature characters on both sides of an ethnic divide that once a week or once every however long for a half-hour or an hour they get involved in some sort of interesting fight. It might be humorous and they eventually work it out somehow, and with good writing that could play out very nicely. There are tricks like that, and to really make that fly in a high-value media market is going to be sort of a trick, especially given that there are enormous profits to be made in the production of television and movies that sort of build off of existing tensions and hatreds. But there are other possibilities.

 
Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. -- George Washington

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Project Acknowledgements

The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project
Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors and Editors
c/o Conflict Information Consortium (Formerly Conflict Research Consortium), University of Colorado
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