"Impact is the Mantra"

In September this year fighting broke out in Monrovia, Liberia. Common Ground Productions operates a radio production facility there - Talking Drum Studio - and the Studio Director, the spouse of an American Embassy employee, was evacuated by the U.S. government.

The local staff didn't have the option to leave, although I still wonder how many would have, even if they were able to go. Their city became a battleground again, yet production never ceased. When the fighting subsided they filed this report on their production activities:

Programming Approach
Talking Drum Studio
(following the September 18-19 fighting in Monrovia)

The resurfacing of violence in the streets of the Liberian capital Monrovia on Friday, September 18, has posed a challenge for institutions such as Talking Drum Studio (TDS), whose goal and mission is to reduce 'conflicts' by promoting peaceful co-existence among all.

This conflict, the first violence since we began operating more than a year ago, led to the loss of lives and property, the detention of accused individuals and, worst of all, the infliction of additional wounds on society.

Our approach at TDS was not to dwell on who was right or wrong, but to remind our listeners that war is not the solution. In our drama series we highlighted the social, economic and political impact of the war and encouraged opposing forces to use dialogue as the best means for settling conflicts. For the feature segments, we reported the casualty figures from the health centres, and later visited the affected zone to assess if conditions that led to the crisis had improved. Our talk-show, "One Step Beyond," did a vox-pop on whether people thought the process/manner in which the conflict was settled (use of arms) was the best option.

Another strategy adopted was for us to move the listeners away from the incidents of September 18 to other issues of importance. Schools were just resuming a new academic year, but were beset with numerous problems ranging from high tuition fees to inadequacy of space, among others.

Our major common ground productions - the drama, feature and talk-shows - mapped out the issues, emphasising that in spite of all the odds, "education is the best gift for the child." Shifting the thinking of our listeners away from their fears and apprehensions helped engage them in more rewarding activities for a better, peaceful future.

Shortly, we will begin a two-week educational campaign based on requests of ten NGOs/INGOs, including the UNHCR, to address the problems, needs and aspirations of more than 30,000 Internally Displaced Persons which resulted from the September 18-19 fighting in Monrovia.

Generally, our activities during and after the recent crisis have been focused on our role of helping Liberians continue the search for common ground.

This memo, written in the wake of violence, stands as a succinct articulation of the 'common ground' approach to media. As the Liberian staff so forcefully demonstrated, common ground media is a means to an end, a tool with which to search for solutions to conflict, encourage dialogue and promote peace. Since 1982, Search for Common Ground (SCG) and Common Ground Productions (CGP), its media production arm, have produced or been part of dozens of media projects aimed at making a positive impact on conflict. The programmes have been made from an array of creative formats: talk-shows, news, call-in, magazine, children's, drama, features, music, documentary. The choice of format is largely up to the judgement of local journalists, producers and area specialists, schooled both in their fields of technical expertise and in conflict resolution techniques. They look to maximise impact given the resources available to them.

Impact has always been the guiding light for common ground media. Search for Common Ground's President, John Marks, recognised early on that to be effective in transforming societal conflict into cooperative action, one had to mobilise the mass media. The creation of Common Ground Productions was the tangible manifestation of this insight and an acknowledgement that, as former New Yorker magazine press critic A.J. Liebling once said, "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one."

Since their inceptions, CGP and SCG have tried to stay on the cutting edge of using media for positive change. In one of its earliest productions - "Search for Common Ground," a 10-part television series that aired across the United States in 1989 - CGP reworked the traditional debate-style format into a dialogue-style one. Arch opponents on explosive issues like abortion, gun control, race and euthanasia were pulled into constructive discussion with one another by a moderator with conflict resolution training who highlighted their commonalities. The series aired on PBS affiliates in America and then was adapted for use in the former Soviet Union, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

In countries like Macedonia, Bosnia and Burundi, where ethnic tension lay at the heart of the conflicts, different techniques were used to promote positive change, techniques geared specifically to those particular conflict situations.

In Macedonia, for example, the country's citizens tend to cluster in 'information ghettos' based primarily on linguistic differences among them (Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, Romane, etc.). Search for Common Ground Macedonia (SCGM) tried to break through these information barriers by facilitating the work of ethnically mixed teams of journalists, resulting in reports that represent the only access members of Macedonia's communities have had to information that comes simultaneously from multiple ethnic groups, whether in print or over radio and TV. In fact, when a series on the economy ("How We Survive") was published simultaneously in the major Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish papers (July 1995), it was the first time in the history of Macedonia's journalism that readers of all three communities had received a feature story with multi-ethnic sources having identical headlines, text, photographs, and captions wherever it appeared. SCGM is currently running its fifth series, a 12-month project called "Search for Civil Society" which involves cross-ethnic collaboration in print, radio and television.

In Burundi, where radio is clearly the most influential medium, SCG/CGP built Studio Ijambo ('wise words' in Kirundi), a production studio staffed by Hutus and Tutsis. The project was launched in 1995 on the heels of the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, where 'hate-radio' broadcasts incited people to butcher one another in the name of ethnicity and nationalism, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. Creating a safe haven where Hutus and Tutsis could work together would have been a valuable exercise in and of itself; doing it with radio, where millions could come to recognise the multi-ethnic sound of Ijambo, offered Burundians a clear and resounding "voice of hope," to borrow the moniker used by Ted Koppel in an ABC-TV "Nightline" profile of the studio. Since then Ijambo journalists have worked in multi-ethnic teams, reporting on the war in their country and on the current fragile peace. They produce news as well as features that highlight issues of importance to Burundians interested in peace and progress. They have gained a reputation as perhaps the most reliable source of information in Burundi and were recently awarded the coveted ECHO (European Community Humanitarian Organisation) radio awards for "humanity in the midst of war". Ijambo has also been a pioneer in the use of radio drama, recording over 100 episodes of "Ababanyi Ni Tebwe" ("Our Neighbours, Ourselves"), a soap that chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Hutu and Tutsi family who live next door to each other.

The list of differing media initiatives goes on, each one unique to the conflict and resources available. In Bosnia, Common Ground Productions produced Resolutions Radio and Radio Zena, the only radio call-in programmes in the country with local hosts who had received conflict resolution training. In both cases, the programme pioneered inter-ethnic communications, creating unprecedented radio bridges between Serb, Muslim and Croat-controlled territories in the days when phoning from one Bosnian entity to the next was more complex than phoning the other side of the planet. More recently, CGP coproduced, with Bosnian partner F.I.S.T. productions, a TV series called "Mimo Vas" (a play on words meaning "life passing by") that highlights the common ground of all Bosnians through an intimate look at their everyday lives.

In Cape Town, South Africa, CGP partnered with Ubuntu TV and Film Productions/Media Peace Centre and the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) to produce "Africa: Search for Common Ground". This 13-part TV and radio series tells the stories of conflicts facing Africa - and of the African people struggling to deal with them. From tension within families to struggles among nations, the series seeks to shed light on what is working and what is not, to challenge old stereotypes and assumptions and to provide audiences with new ways of thinking about conflicts and new tools for coping with them.

"Africa: Search for Common Ground" was produced in English, French and Portuguese and featured stories from across the continent. The two-medium strategy - TV and radio - ensured a broad audience, geographically and economically speaking; at last count, the series had been broadcast in more than 22 African countries. The scope of the production - stories in 16 countries, recorded in more than 40 different dialects, using production teams from a multitude of ethnicities - gave the series its uniquely pan-African texture. South African reviewer Zakes Mda, writing in the Sunday Times, put it like this: "We need to see more of this continent on our television screen - and not through the eyes of the Western media. It is in this light ... I must commend the producers of 'Africa: Search for Common Ground'."

Reviews like this, and the high ratings figures the series produced, tell us something about the impact of our programming, but they are by no means the whole picture. In most of the countries and conflicts where SCG/CGP work, media reviewers are few and far between, audience rating figures non-existent. Yet if maximum impact is the mantra of Common Ground media, then audience feedback is critical.

Herein lies another defining characteristic of the common ground approach to media: research. As our organisation has become more established we have devoted an increasing share of resources to both formative and summative research. The former entails designing programmes around an expertly planned slate of intended audience outcomes, while the latter involves capturing the lessons of our experience.

CGP's Talking Drum Studio (TDS) in Liberia has led the way here, working with Dr. Ed Palmer, CGP's Senior Research Advisor, to devise the CGP Rapid Survey Method - a new survey tool for broadcasters in war zones. Using a combination of conventional intercept and quota survey methods, the team conducted a quick, low-budget but useful survey of Liberian listening habits, the first such survey in many years. The results indicated, among other things, a 90 percent listenership for TDS within the Monrovia area. More promising still was that 75 percent of those polled could actually verbalise the kind of programmes that TDS makes: peacebuilding, reconciliation, dialogue and so on.

On another research front CGP is working closely with the Children's Television Workshop (producers of "Sesame Street") to design the first conflict resolution curriculum for kids. Macedonia will be the site for the first series, whose format will hopefully be adapted for use by children in other conflict situations. Experts on children's education, conflict resolution, media production and research techniques are coming together for intensive brainstorming on the series curriculum and format for implementation. Goals for the series are being clearly defined in such a way that researchers will be able to assess changes in the knowledge, attitude or behaviour of the children who watched.

This research is meant to complement rather than supplant the largely intuitive, journalistic model of programme design that has served our media work so well in the past. Audience survey data will undoubtedly help us to refine our programme strategy - what hours of the day are better to target than others, what broadcasters to favour - but it is no substitute for the anecdotal evidence that emanates from each project. How does one compare audience ratings, for example, with Talking Drum's successful effort to galvanise Liberian radio stations and newspapers into a formal coalition called "Media Against Conflict"? How does one value the fact that a number of participants in our Macedonia inter-ethnic media projects have founded new periodicals and papers which strive to differ from the ethno-centric media where they worked before? How does one assess support for local journalists who risk their lives daily to shine a light on the dark crimes of humanity?

At the moment, there is no widely accepted way to evaluate media initiatives like this and others by Search for Common Ground and Common Ground Productions that seek to ameliorate conflict. These are early days yet in the effort to understand the link between media and conflict management - despite the painfully apparent link between mass media and mass violence throughout this century.

Sheldon Himmelfarb is Executive Producer of Common Ground Productions.

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