Media Sensitivity to Conflicts : A Comparative Study of India and the United States 1999-2004

Contents: Introduction. 1. Overview of media in the two democracies. 2. Freedom of information. 3. Reform of the fourth estate. 4. The USA Patriot Act and beyond. 5. Propaganda and disinformation. 6. News framing and media imperialism. 7. A new kind of war and a perilous responsibility for war-correspondents. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

"In the Post Cold War period, the concept of security assumed holistic proportions. Prior to the 1990s, military security decreed the hierarchy of nations and the concept of good governance, perceived more precisely as a people-centric paradigm, did not gain much credibility. With the end of the Cold War, governability and social change started involving (along with the nation-state) the primary agents of political socialization, with the mass media augmenting its role as a harbinger of socio-political transformation.

With the Kargil War (1999) in India, and the terrorist attacks on the U.S. In 2001, Mass media globally became the defining element of world political change. In such a context, the balance or the lack of it, between rhetoric and political reality, as encapsuled by the media lens assumes unprecedented significance. A mass media, dictated by jingoistic pressures, commercial interests and the cut-throat race to survive globally, started valourizing insignificant political elements, thus de-glamourizing truth and reality. In such a scenario, an observation into the harshest political insights has been attempted in the annals of this book."