MEDIA AND INFORMATION WARFARE

Media and Information Warfare

Media and Information Warfare

Introduction

Media and information warfare is very significant in influencing the audience perception towards particular concept, group, or entity. Media effect has been a prime concern in different study domains to determine its impact in broad range of dimensions. The relationship between media and politics has always been crucial and rather undeniable. Media helps in connecting the individuals to world and represents the identity of society. Critics have argued that an inverse relation exist between the impact of media on political progress.

Influence of media and information on political process is dependent on numerous factors. Changes in the factor dimensions determine whether media has influenced political process positively or negatively. These factorial dimensions include background of situation, political status, religion, and traditions in a country. These dimensions also affect the way things are prevailing and accepted in a society. For example, countries like United Kingdom and North America tend to have a stronger relationship with the media.

Media is considered as a significant medium of interaction with general public and stakeholders of government and expressing their opinions to authoritative figures.

Contrastingly, countries having monarchy system and conservative way of thinking perceive everything as acceptable and true whatever media represents. This is due to the fact that media holds strong influential power to direct the actions of public and their opinions. Due to strong adherence to media as sole information providing medium, people tend to be obstruct in limiting their decisions and believes to the perceptive level of selective thinking created by media as external influencer. However, differences in media approach to influence outcomes and outcomes that arise somehow created a conflict in terms of determining the authenticity of material that is present on media.

Background/ Literature Review

The media are active factors of warfare at least since the Nazis used the German press, radio and cinema newsreels, especially the weekly and monthly-first as propaganda that legitimized the war of invasion and then as a disinformation ploy of the enemy. Obviously the most effective in this regard, and with greater expertise used by the Nazis, was the radio, media that played a dual role: providing false information to the people who were to be invaded to not be alarmed or resist, and to convey key information to its employees during the invasion, with slogans and messages of all types against which the people had no way to react.

What makes his appearance with the war in Vietnam is the presence of television, providing nearly instantaneous images of the war, which will strongly contradictory effects in the American population: the mentality of the sixties transformed images which, in large measure, it wanted war propaganda, true boomerang against the Government and the war in much of the population, especially among young people.

The information war will be fought now not only in the country of combat, but also and especially in the U.S. where the press in those years still maintains a strong independence from the ...