Norwegian peace studies professor Johann Galtung has laid out 12 points of concern where journalism often goes wrong when dealing with violence.

1. Decontextualising violence: focusing on violence as "irrational" or presenting it as endemic, without looking at the reasons for unresolved conflicts and polarisation, and ignoring the historical causes for grievances - thus making events seem unknoweably "complex."

2. Dualism: reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved. Stories that just focus on internal developments often ignore such outside or "external" forces as foreign governments and transnational companies.

3. Manicheanism: portraying one side as good and demonising the other as "evil."

4. Armageddon: presenting violence as inevitable, omitting the alternatives.

5. Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes such as poverty, government neglect, and military or police repression.

6. Confusion: focusing only on the conflict arena (i.e. the battlefield or location of violent incidents) but not on the forces and factors that influence the violence.

7. Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence.

8. Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage itself.

9. Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers.

10. Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes.

11. Confusing ceasefires and negotiations with actual peace.

12. Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts is absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can help engender even more violence, when people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing.