Contacts across borders can help cool international tensions
At its best, good journalism can improve understanding and ease tensions in times of great international conflict.
This idea was put to the test again and again in a five-year programme to train more than 1,000 reporters, editors and producers from the EU’s neighbours in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
The €5.3 million European Neighbourhood Journalism Network (ENJN) was one of the biggest media development programmes ever undertaken by the EU, and Thomson Foundation was a leading partner.
Completely new networks and sources
As soon as the training sessions began in 2008, journalists were thrown together with potential enemies: Israelis working with neighbouring Arabs, Georgians and Russians, Azeris and Armenians. It succeeded better than anyone had dared hope.
The final report of the European Neighbourhood Journalism Network says those potential enemies often became friends and contacts across borders creating completely new networks and sources.
What has been achieved went beyond all expectations.
Building stories that are balanced
The report mentioned that "when the conflict developed between Georgia and Russia, journalists on one side were able to make contact with participants on the other side to verify reports or to exchange information, vital to telling more balanced stories. This was repeated time and again during the project – Ukrainians able to source contacts in Egypt during the first days of the 2011 protests, Azeris talking to Armenians for information during heightened tensions in 2009 – to name but a few.”
Building bridges
Another success of the programme was the Periscope project where Israeli reporter Ruth Eglash and Jordanian journalist Hani Hazaimeh decided to build a new media bridge between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East and around the world. “We hope to achieve this by creating an online community of journalists and bloggers who will comment on co-existence in the region and on humanity, also through highlighting human interest stories and shared issues such as the environment, human trafficking and child rights.”
Raising awareness and understanding
"What has been achieved went beyond all expectations," said Štefan Füle, European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy. "The project has made an important contribution to raising awareness and understanding within partner countries of the Neighbourhood Policy... My sincere congratulations go to the participants and the partners involved... for a great job done."
