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

This article provides an overview and critical 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. It reviews existing approaches that have shaped debates over the last 30 years and critically evaluates the significance of new communication technologies and organised persuasive communication in this context. The central objective is to assess both the extent to which the orthodox elite-driven paradigm remains relevant to the 21st century and the major questions now facing attempts to theorise the relationship between war and media. It is argued that existing theoretical accounts retain significant purchase, despite the emergence of the Internet-based contemporary media environment, and that greater academic attention needs to be paid to organised persuasive communication.