Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror

In the post-9/11 era, media technologies have become increasingly intertwined with vertical power as airwaves, airports, air space, and orbit have been commandeered to support national security and defense. In this book, Lisa Parks develops the concept of vertical mediation to explore how audiovisual cultures enact and infer power relations far beyond the screen. Focusing on TV news, airport checkpoints, satellite imagery, and drone media, Parks demonstrates how "coverage" makes vertical space intelligible to global publics in new ways and powerfully reveals what is at stake in controlling it.

Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare.