Overview

Forged over the course of a century, the connections between war and media run long and deep. As this book reveals, the history of war and its telling has been a battle over public perception. The selection of which stories are told and which are ignored helps justify past battles and ensure future wars. Narratives of protest and pain, defeat and suffering, guilt and abuse struggle to be heard amid the empowering myths of war and heroism. As Robin Andersen argues, the history of struggle between war and its representation has changed the way war is fought and the way we tell the stories of war. Information management, once called censorship and propaganda, has developed in tandem with new media technologies. Now, digital imaging creates virtual battlefields as computer-based technologies transform the weapons of war. Along the way, images on the nightly news, on movie screens, and in video games have turned war into entertainment. In the grip of virtual war, it is difficult to realize the loss of compassion or the consequences for democracy.

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9780820478937

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« Robin Andersen has long been an incisive media critic with great scope and depth. In 'A Century of Media, A Century of War', she provides a sharp overview of a grisly media landscape. This book is a fierce light that removes the shadowy evasions of our easy reveries for war. The result is a chilling panorama of what we routinely hide from ourselves - bitter truths about media systems that deceive men and women into avidly or passively supporting the latest war. Readers can take little comfort from this well-documented story, but they can learn crucial lessons about real-life consequences when media outlets serve the warfare state. -- Norman Solomon

Robin Andersen has long been an incisive media critic with great scope and depth. In 'A Century of Media, A Century of War', she provides a sharp overview of a grisly media landscape. This book is a fierce light that removes the shadowy evasions of our easy reveries for war. The result is a chilling panorama of what we routinely hide from ourselves - bitter truths about media systems that deceive men and women into avidly or passively supporting the latest war. Readers can take little comfort from this well-documented story, but they can learn crucial lessons about real-life consequences when media outlets serve the warfare state. (Norman Solomon, Author, 'War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death')

Author Information

The Author: Robin Andersen is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine. Her writings appear in numerous book chapters and journal articles, and she is the author of Consumer Culture and TV Programming (1995) and co-editor of Critical Studies in Media Commercialism (2000).

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