War And Conflict Communication Influencing Public Opinion

How does the American public formulate its opinions about U.S. foreign policy and military engagement abroad? War Stories argues that the media systematically distort the information the public vitally needs to determine whether to support such initiatives, for reasons having more to do with journalists' professional interests than the merits of the policies, and that this has significant consequences for national security. Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling develop a "strategic bias" theory that explains the foreign-policy communication process as a three-way interaction among the press, political elites, and the public, each of which has distinct interests, biases, and incentives. Do media representations affect public support for the president and faithfully reflect events in times of diplomatic crisis and war? How do new media--especially Internet news and more partisan outlets--shape public opinion, and how will they alter future conflicts? In answering such questions, Baum and Groeling take an in-depth look at media coverage, elite rhetoric, and public opinion during the Iraq war and other U.S. conflicts abroad. They trace how traditional and new media select stories, how elites frame and sometimes even distort events, and how these dynamics shape public opinion over the course of a conflict. Most of us learn virtually everything we know about foreign policy from media reporting of elite opinions. In War Stories, Baum and Groeling reveal precisely what this means for the future of American foreign policy.

During the Global War on Terror, multiple wars of ideas and images played out as belligerents and various competing political interests sought to influence multiple public spheres toward their desired political goals. At the same time, the international media played a vital role in framing the issues, debates, and events in the arena of ideas that accompanied the conflict. These wars of ideas and images had profound effects on domestic and international public opinion, which not only influenced events and operations during the conflict, but also threatened the outcome. This study traces these wars of ideas and images from the prewar debates following September 11, 2001 through military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. It not only examines how belligerents and various competing political interests sought to shape public opinion toward their political objectives during the Global War on Terror, but also examines both media performance on the battlefield and the media's role in shaping public opinion, policy, and events during the war. As a foundation for understanding media's role in modern wars of ideas, this study also provides a crucial examination of media's influence on U.S public opinion and policy during important events in U.S. history, to include a fresh examination of media performance and influence during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. This study is essential for anyone wanting to understand the wars of ideas and images that accompany military conflict and international crisis, the challenges of reporting combat, and the media's power to influence public opinion and policy. Thoroughly researched and meticulously cited, this important multi-discipline study significantly contributes to the history and understanding to today's conflicts.

Do the news media have any role in the transformation of war and warfare? Focusing on television, this book argues that the news media alters the cognitive and strategic environment of the actors of war and politics and therefore changes the way these interact with one another.

Most research on framing has focused on media and elite frames: the ways that the mass media and politicians present information about issues and events to the public. Until now, the process by which citizens' opinions may affect the initial frame-building process has been largely ignored. The two-way flow of influence between public opinion and decision-makers has been analyzed more from a top-down than a bottom-up perspective. Olmastroni addresses this issue by introducing a cyclical model of framing. Additionally, most empirical studies on media framing have centered on the United States. Olmastroni's text seeks to overcome this limitation of prior research by examining different types of framing in three different countries. Framing War uses the recent war on Iraq as a case study, focusing on the elite and media framing of this event in order to examine the interaction between the political elite and the mass public in three Western democracies--France, Italy, and the US--during the early and on-going stages of the military crisis. The book analyzes whether and, potentially, the extent to which decision-makers tracked and responded to public opinion in presenting their foreign policy choices. It examines the strategies and approaches that governments potentially adopted to influence public opinion towards either the need for or the lack of need for a military intervention. By representing the framing paradigm as a cycle, Olmastroni shows how each actor within the system (i.e., government and other elites, news media, and public opinion) is linked to the others and contributes to the final representation of an issue. In contrast with other theoretical perspectives of framing, this book states that the framing influence does not only proceed from the government to the public, but it often moves at the same level of the system, with each actor playing different roles. Olmastroni's insights on framing are significant for researchers in international relations, political communication, public opinion, comparative politics, and political psychology, as well as policy analysts, journalists, and commentators.

Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, including founders of the field of political communication Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, Doris Graber, Max McCombs, and Thomas Paterson,to review the major findings about subjects ranging from the effects of political advertising and debates and understandings and misunderstandings of agenda setting, framing, and cultivation to the changing contours of social media use in politics and the functions of the press in a democratic system. The essays in this volume reveal that political communication is a hybrid field with complex ancestry, permeable boundaries, and interests that overlap with those of related fields such as political sociology, public opinion, rhetoric, neuroscience, and the new hybrid on the quad, media psychology. This comprehensive review of the political communication literature is an indispensible reference for scholars and students interested in the study of how, why, when, and with what effect humans make sense of symbolic exchanges about sharing and shared power. The sixty-two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication contain an overview of past scholarship while providing critical reflection of its relevance in a changing media landscape and offering agendas for future research and innovation.

This journalism master's project includes a professional work component and a research component. The professional work component details the author's experiences working at ABC News in Washington, D.C. During that time, the author produced webcasts, saw the inner workings of Nightline and produced elements for a Sunday morning political show. Includes field notes and examples of work. In the research component the author looks at "one specific theory and its use by the media to explain why the president of the United States entered into two conflicts." (p. 4) The theory, called "the diversionary theory of war ... contends that public opinion serves as the foundation for the president's decision to enter into conflict." (p. 5) "It is suggested President Clinton attempted to divert attention from the domestic crisis of low popularity standings caused by his sex scandal with Monica S. Lewinsky, ... by ordering the bombing of targets in Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq." (p. 6) "By demonstrating that public opinion is used in the determination of foreign policy, a relationship forms among the media, the public and the president as the media influence public opinion about the president and report the results of public opinion concerning the president." (p. 5) Includes a literature review.

Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts. Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, War and Democratic Constraint links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

The first comprehensive study of the contentious issue of the public's right to know in time of war or limited conflict. The book traces the uneasy relations between the military and a generally unprepared and gullible media, from the Crimea to the present day. It shows how the advent of nuclear warfare has outlawed the nationalistic wars of survival of the past, and freed the citizen from his age-old obligations in time of war, able to make up his or her own mind on the merits of the situation. It is here that the battle lies, in the struggle for public opinion as a necessary precursor to war. This book details how the military discovered the secret of media and public manipulation in the Falklands, tested it in Grenada, and refined it in Panama before deploying it in all its glory during the Gulf. This book is essential reading for every soldier and journalist, or any student of military history as it points the way to the future.