Citizen, mainstream and peace journalism relationship in covering Syria events: a content analysis of Aljazeera

Abstract

With the intercession of the new media, individuals were able to write news and publish videos through their participations on Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This article is centered on citizen journalism which comes from the participation of citizens in making news. The main purpose of this article is to show the relationship between citizen journalism and mainstream journalism in covering Syrian news, and how peace journalism represents in both. A questionnaire designed to analyze the content of five Syrian events on Aljazeera news channel. The five Syrian events are Al-Bayda and Baniyas, the siege of Bab Amr, al Qusair and Khalidiya in Homs, Yarmouk camp, chemical on Al Gota. Result shows that Aljazeera uses a significant number of footages and contents which came from Syrian citizen journalists; it is presented as 46.3 %. Due to shared political agendas between Aljazeera and citizen journalists, Aljazeera depends on their footages more than their own reporters while they are covering Syrian news. Majority of footages reflect Syrian opposition and the killing of Syrians which resulted from Al-Assad Regime. We suggest that news content published by citizen journalists on their blogs and YouTube should be analyzed for other studies.