Media empowerment vs. strategies of control: Theorising news media and war in the 21st Century

Abstract

Conflict defined the 20 th century with the two world wars shaping the geo-political context for almost the entire century. The 21 st century has seen no let up, with two major US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominating the foreign policy agendas of Western governments and the militarised response, the so-called »war on terror«, to groups such as Al Qaeda. At the same time, the last 100 years have witnessed the rapid emergence of new forms of mass communication, including wireless radio, newsreels and cinema, mass circulation newspapers, television and the Internet. Right from the start, the power of communication in wartime was fully recognised: From the deployment of Nazi propaganda masterminded by Goebbels through to the creation of the Ministry of Information in Britain, tasked with the »maintenance of moral«, media became an integral part of national war efforts. Today, governments devote significant resources in order to shape the information environment in their favour and, in doing so, win a global battle for »hearts and minds«. This article provides an overview and assessment of the ways in which political communication scholarship has sought to understand and explain the importance of news media vis-à-vis war and international politics. The aim is to review existing approaches that have shaped debates over the last 30 years and to critically evaluate the significance of major contemporary debates over new communication technology and organised persuasive communication (also frequently referred to as propaganda, perception management or strategic communication). Of course, news media are only one part of much broader communications media and analysis of mediums such as cinema and popular entertainment are of importance. But news media, including its contemporary online variants, remain the central site upon which information about war and conflict is disseminated. For this reason much of the relevant scholarship focuses on news media and this fact is reflected in the contents of this article. The article proceeds in three sections. The first section reviews the elite-driven orthodoxy that has traditionally informed our understanding of wartime media-state relations. The second assesses what is termed here as the first post-Cold War media empowerment debate, that of the CNN-effect debate in the 1990s. The third section assesses current debates over the new media environment, termed here as the second post-Cold War media empowerment debate and concurrent research on organized persuasive communication. The central objective is to assess both the extent to which the orthodox paradigm remains relevant to the 21st century and the ZfP 61. Jg. 4/2014