Military Media Management: Negotiating the 'Front' Line in Mediatized War

This book examines the practices of actors involved in the media reportage of war, and the ways in which these practices may influence the conduct of modern military operations.

War is a complex phenomenon which raises numerous questions about the organization of society that continue to challenge all those involved in its study. Increasingly, this includes the need to engage theoretically and empirically with the progressive collapse between the ways in which wars are conducted and the manner in which they are reported in the media.

Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Military Media Management offers a distinctly new approach to our appreciation of the dynamic relationship between war and media; one that is fundamentally a product of social relations between those engaged in reporting war, and those conducting war campaigns. By exploring how and why the military manage information in particular ways, the text succeeds in providing a framework through which wider sociological investigation of this relationship can be understood.

This book will be of much interest to students of military and security studies, media studies, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

Sarah Maltby is a lecturer in sociology and media. She is the founder of the War and Media Network and co-editor of Communicating War: Memory, Military and Media (Arima Publishing, 2007). Her research centres on military information management and representations of conflict in military and journalistic output.