Andrew Hoskins & Ben O’Loughlin 
War and Media 

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.

Table of Content

Acknowledgements x

List of Tables and Figures xi

1 Introduction 1

1. Diffused War 3

2. The Two Phases of Mediatization 15

3. Conclusion 18

2 Images 20

1. Introduction: Do Images of War Show or Hide? 20

2. Photograph and Flux 23

3. Mediality 26

4. Emergence 30

5. Saddam Hussein’s Execution 32

6. Conclusion 35

3 Compassion 37

1. Introduction: What is Compassion Fatigue? 37

2. Why News Values Keep Some Stories Off the Radar 39

3. Exploring Spectator-Sufferer Relations 44

4. How Do Media Enable or Restrict Compassion? 53

5. Conclusion 59

4 Witness 61

1. Introduction 61

2. Representation and the Truth of War 63

3. Witnessing 69

4. Conclusion 85

5 Genocide 86

1. Introduction 86

2. Premediation and the Holocaust 89

3. Media Templates 91

4. The Trnopolje Camp Images 94

5. Towards an Ethics of Images 97

6. Emergence 102

6 Memory 104

1. The Diffusion of Media and Memory 104

2. The Second Memory Boom 106

3. Media and Holocaust Memory 108

4. From Witness to Embodied Memories 112

5. The Third Memory Boom 116

7 Vectors 120

1. Vectors and Globalization 122

2. Controlling Vectors 126

3. Emergent Vectors 136

4. Conclusion 143

8 Radicalization 145

1. The Mediatization of Radicalization 147

2. Diffuse Relations Between Cause and Effect 150

3. Uncertainty for Policymakers and Journalists Enables ‘Hypersecurity’ to Emerge 155

4. Conclusion 160

9 Legitimacy 162

1. Introduction: Legitimacy, Representation, Discourse 162

2. The Power of Representations 164

3. Diffuse War Axes of Representation 169

4. Translation and Legitimacy 179

5. Conclusion 183

10 Methods 185

1. Identifying Effects amid Ubiquitous Media 186

2. How Do We Analyse Media Practices? 188

3. How Do We Analyse Discursive Linking? Nexus Analysis 189

4. Conclusion 191

Notes 193

References 198

Further Reading 217

Name Index 218

Subject Index 223

About the author

Andrew Hoskins is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Ben O’Loughlin is Reader in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London.