This book focuses on the social process of conflict news production and the emergence of public discourse on war and armed conflict. Its contributions combine qualitative and quantitative approaches through interview studies and computer-assisted content analysis and apply a unique comparative and holistic approach over time, across different cycles of six conflicts in three regions of the world, and across different types of domestic, international and transnational media. In so doing, it explores the roles of public communication through traditional media, social media, strategic communication, and public relations in informing and involving national and international actors in conflict prevention, resolution and peace-keeping. It provides a key point of reference for creative, innovative, and state-of-the-art empirical research on media and armed conflict.

Ironically, as telecommunications technology—the embodiment of modernity—advances, bringing people in different nations into more direct contact during conflict situations, traditional cultural factors become increasingly important as differing ways of thinking and acting collide. The mass media can be seen as a factor in the creation of international conflict; they also, claim many scholars, are the key to control and resolution of those problems. Whichever side of the coin one chooses to look at—mass communication as cause or cure of conflict—there is no doubt that the news media are no longer peripheral players on the global scene; they are important participants whose organizational patterns of behavior, values, and motivations must be taken into account in understanding national and international conflict. In this volume, a distinguished group of authors explores the variety of ways the news media—newspapers, radio, and television—are involved in conflict situations. Conflicts between the United States and Iran, India and Pakistan, and the United States and China are examined, and national-level studies in Sri Lanka, Iran, Hong Kong, and the United States provide varied contexts in which the authors look at the complex interrelationships among government, news media, and the public in conflict situations.

Documents how Milosevic seized control of the media, directed it, and organized the mechanism for propagating the Big Lie--turning truth on its head ... and chronicles how many media outlets worked to turn communities against each other. [back cover].

A leading foreign correspondent looks at how social media has transformed the modern battlefield, and how wars are fought Modern warfare is a war of narratives, where bullets are fired both physically and virtually. Whether you are a president or a terrorist, if you don't understand how to deploy the power of social media effectively you may win the odd battle but you will lose a twenty-first century war. Here, journalist David Patrikarakos draws on unprecedented access to key players to provide a new narrative for modern warfare. He travels thousands of miles across continents to meet a de-radicalized female member of ISIS recruited via Skype, a liberal Russian in Siberia who takes a job manufacturing "Ukrainian" news, and many others to explore the way social media has transformed the way we fight, win, and consume wars-and what this means for the world going forward.

The CNN Effect examines the relationship between the state and its media, and considers the role played by the news reporting in a series of 'humanitarian' interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. Piers Robinson challenges traditional views of media subservience and argues that sympathetic news coverage at key moments in foreign crises can influence the response of Western governments.

News stories provide an essential confirmation of our ideas about who we are, what we have to fear, and what to do about it: a marketplace of ideas, shopped by rational citizen decision makers but also a shared resource for grounding our contested narratives of identity in objective reality. News as a fundamental social process comes into being not when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created but when that report becomes news to someone. As it moves off the page into the community, news discovers - through its interpretations - its reality in the lives of the consumers. This book explores the path of news as it moves through the tangled labyrinth of social identities and asserted interests that lie beyond the page or screen. The language and communication-oriented study of news promises a salient area of investigation, pointing the way to an expansion, if not a redefinition of basic anthropological ideas and practices of ethnography, participant observation, and “the field” in the future of anthropological research.