The interaction between media and foreign policy is a critical dimension of the so-called age of 'new military humanitarianism'. The media is now more effective in gathering and distributing information all over the world and media coverage of humanitarian wars allows for information and images to reach a wide audience with great immediacy and realism. For policy making, the 24/7 news cycle means high levels of exposure to fast-breaking international stories receiving global attention and producing a powerful 'do something!' effect. This topical book widens the debate beyond US media and policy making by considering the case of Western and Eastern European media and policy processes. It tests the wider application of existing theoretical approaches and provides useful comparisons, allowing the reader to draw conclusions on the media–policy relationship. It is an excellent resource for all those interested in political communication, European politics and media studies.

"The interaction between media and foreign policy is a critical dimension of the so-called age of 'new military humanitarianism'. The media is now more effective in gathering and distributing information all over the world and media coverage of humanitarian wars allows for information and images to reach a wide audience with great immediacy and realism. For policy making, the 24/7 news cycle means high levels of exposure to fast-breaking international stories receiving global attention and producing a powerful 'do something!' effect. This topical book widens the debate beyond US media and policy making by considering the case of Western and Eastern European media and policy processes. It tests the wider application of existing theoretical approaches and provides useful comparisons, allowing the reader to draw conclusions on the media-policy relationship. It is an excellent resource for all those interested in political communication, European politics and media studies."--Provided by publisher.

With a focus on both national and local levels, Uncivil Wars takes an energetic and critical look at the mechanics of political campaigning through the lens of communication theory.

This book offers a diachronical and inter-/transmedia approach to the relationship of media and fear in a variety of geographical and cultural settings. This allows for an in-depth understanding of the media’s role in pandemics, wars and other crises, as well as in political intimidation. The book assembles chapters from a variety of authors, focusing on the relation between media and fear in the West, the Middle East, the Arab World and China. Besides its geographical and cultural diversity, the volume also takes a long-term perspective, bringing together cases from transforming media environments which span over a century. The book establishes a strong and historically persistent nexus between media and fear, which finds ever-new forms with new media but always follows similar logics.

This collection, part of a series entitled Visual Politics of War, presents some of the key approaches to war reporting and suggests trajectories for further critical research into media visualisation of conflict. Ever since the Vietnam War, media globalisation has made conflict a part of everyone’s life in the modern world. This is where war reporters play the crucial role of mediators, to bring us stories covering the various dimensions of war from some of the most vulnerable places on Earth. This volume will explore the visual culture of conflict, specifically the war on terror that is grounded in the conceptual claim that images are central to contemporary geopolitics.

Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen examines how American political operatives use "personalized political communication" to engage with the electorate, and weighs the implications of ground war tactics for how we understand political campaigns and what it means to participate in them. He shows how ground wars are waged using resources well beyond those of a given candidate and their staff. These include allied interest groups and civic associations, party-provided technical infrastructures that utilize large databases with detailed individual-level information for targeting voters, and armies of dedicated volunteers and paid part-timers. Nielsen challenges the notion that political communication in America must be tightly scripted, controlled, and conducted by a select coterie of professionals. Yet he also quashes the romantic idea that canvassing is a purer form of grassroots politics. In today's political ground wars, Nielsen demonstrates, even the most ordinary-seeming volunteer knocking at your door is backed up by high-tech targeting technologies and party expertise. Ground Wars reveals how personalized political communication is profoundly influencing electoral outcomes and transforming American democracy.

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media. War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics. This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.