Unlocking the Media’s Future and Fostering Social Harmony: The Power of Deliberative Communication

As I write this article, another conflict in the Middle East is forcing the media - once again – to grapple with how it portrays different actors, and how it maintains balance and objectivity. This is just the latest event to force the media to self-reflect on how it operates and how it faces the challenges ahead. And those challenges are plenty: falling audience and readership numbers, reduced income and budgets, polarization, increasing hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, propaganda, lying politicians, falling trust in the media, attacks on journalists, disappearing local news outlets creating ‘new deserts’, captured media, and in some cases crackdowns and increasing political pressure on media professionals. As the MEDIAdelcom project comes to end, can it provide an option - deliberative communication or deliberative journalism - for the media to embrace that could help address these challenges?