Conflict is a characteristic of modern society. Whether interstate or intra-state, political or social, physical or “cold”, it remains a major factor of human suffering across a large number of places around the world. Since cognizing such conflicts is necessarily achieved through mass media, and since how something is represented inextricably affects how the thing is perceived, mass media’s coverage of conflict can either increase or resolve it. Media’s contribution in today’s conflict is remarkable to the extent that they determine which conflicts are given the salience of importance and in which fields of meaning these conflicts are represented, which subsequently determines how individuals interpret such conflicts.

Understanding media’s role in conflict, however, calls for more than one reductionist hypodermic needle model, solely emphasizing how media producers inject passive consumers with ideas and attitudes to hold regarding particular conflicts. Instead, scholars and researchers bring together different perspectives and theoretical frameworks from Media Studies, Cultural Studies, political science, and communication theory, “each help sensitize us to important dimensions of mediatized conflict. But each exhibits deficiencies and blind-spots that limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved” (Cottle, 2006).

Cottle (2006) argues that current research practice and the theorization of media and conflicts is directed by three overarching paradigms: the manufacturing consent paradigm; media contest paradigm; and media culture paradigm. These paradigms “condition the kinds of questions asked, the conceptual and the theoretical frameworks guiding research, the methodological approaches deployed, the epistemological assumptions made about what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and the role of political values and commitments in academic enquiry” (p.13).

The manufacturing consent paradigm, manifested in Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, expose the subtle, hidden power of media as (in Althusser’s words) an ideological state apparatus functioning to disseminate certain ideologies through certain discourses with the ultimate goal of “positioning or interpellating subjects within such ideologies (Althusser, 1971), manipulating them (the subjects), and persuading (not convincing) them to unquestionably accept such ideologies as commonsense. Though Chomsky’s work is more concerned with (the ideology of) capitalism, it illustrates the foregoing paradigm by considering media as operating through five filters: ownership, advertising, media elite (official sources), flak, and the common enemy.

Within media contest paradigm, media discourse is scrutinized under the frameworks of critical theory, and it is concerned with contest and contention within media representations. Media are typically approached as sites of powered struggle and unequal contestation, rather than as a foregone ideological conclusion or as a mouthpiece for dominant interests (Cottle, 2006).

Though the third paradigm, media culture paradigm, is also associated with some of the aforementioned concepts, it draws from research within the field of Cultural Studies, considering media as part and parcel of everyday life and as inextricably fused with late modern forms of existence. As Kellner (1995) puts it, “media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, sharing political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities.

While these perspectives do indeed provide researchers with solid, diverse, and multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks, with the help of which media discourse is analyzed, it is not to neglect other related theories -e.g., McComb and Shaw’s (1972) agenda setting theory which can explain why some conflicts are more salient than others; Priming and Framing which can explain how the adopted discourse influences its interpretation; Cultivation theory; Uses and Gratifications theory; etc., to better deconstruct the complex media discourse related to world conflicts and construct the hidden ideologies behind it.

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Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology andideological state apparatuses. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Lenin and philosophy and other essays. NewYork: Monthly Review Press.

Cottle, Simon (2006), Mediatized Conflict:Developments in Media and Conflict Studies,

Open University Press.

Entman, M. Robert (1993). Framing :Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication.

Keller, D. (1995). Mediacommunication vs. Cultural Studies : Overcoming the divide. Communication Theory 5(2):162 – 177.

McCombs, Maxwell and Shaw, Donald (1972).The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly.

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