With a great reliance on its extensive international network, the Center operates as a facilitator and partner in a wide variety of training projects, publishes and disseminates significant communication scholarship and advances the communication discipline through meaningful research, teaching and service.
CMPI shares a commitment to make better sense of the role communication plays in global politics and the relationship between communication and conflict.
The news media can be a crucial tool for mobilizing public opinion in favor of peace processes. What is the ability of political leaders and journalists to promote peace through the news media?
There are at least three major ways in which the news media can serve as obstacles to peace: (1) by focusing on events rather than processes; (2) by focusing on the unusual, the dramatic, and the conflictual aspects of the process; and (3) by making it difficult to conduct successful negotiations.
Similarly, the news media can create opportunities for peace, reconciliation, and conflict prevention.For journalists to live up to their professional responsibilities in peace building, they must evaluate the avalanche of propaganda from parties in conflict. All too often, journalists are caught up between the propaganda machinery and the audience. Journalist should not support a policy of violence in their reporting. While reporters should report, as accurately and fully as they can, the facts they encounter, they should aspire to create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict.
CMPI training focuses on media’s obstacles and opportunities for peace building and nonviolence.