Conflict as Media Content

Abstract

Conflicts are endemic to the known social world and can be defined straightforwardly as struggles between opposing interests and outlooks. How the media report and represent conflicts have been questions throughout the history of media and communications research. From early studies of propaganda in World War I to the latest research into the media's role in propagating, post‐9/11, the US‐led “global war on terror,” media researchers have analyzed and theorized the multiple roles, dimensions, determinants, and impacts of media conflict reporting. In addition to studies of war reporting, countless others have examined, for example, how minority groups and protesters have been labeled and stereotyped in the media and how new social movements and cultural identities seek media access and symbolic recognition; how moral panics, public crises, and political scandals are performed and conditioned on the media stage (→ Scandalization in the News); how some conflicts become forgotten or hidden in dominant news agendas and how in others the media become involved in forwarding peace processes; how natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies are signaled around the world and how global risks, such as the fallout from nuclear accidents, migrating health pandemics, or climate change, become periodically symbolized and dramatized, discussed and debated (→ Agenda Building; Cottle 2006; in press).