Australian Journal of International Affairs

ISSN: 1035-7718 (Print) 1465-332X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/caji20

The mediatisation of war in a transforming global

media landscape

Sebastian Kaempf

To cite this article: Sebastian Kaempf (2013) The mediatisation of war in a transforming
global media landscape, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67:5, 586-604, DOI:
10.1080/10357718.2013.817527

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2013.817527

Published online: 19 Sep 2013.

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Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2013
Vol. 67, No. 5, 586604, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2013.817527

The mediatisation of war in a transforming global

media landscape1

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF*

Before the rise of digital new media technology in 2002, ‘old’ media at its
heart displayed a fundamental division between sender and receiver, a
division which for a long time had structurally, materially and politically
conditioned the nature of the relationship between ‘old’ media and war.
Within the recently emerging digital new media technology, however, this
age-old separation between sender and receiver has been eroded. Thus,
alongside traditional media platforms, an entirely new form of media
technology has arisen. This development has transformed the hitherto
multipolar nature of the old media landscape and has led to a heteropolar
global media landscape, in which the relationship between media and war
has been altered. By exploring how digital new media poles are forming
and old media poles are evolving, this article examines how this seismic
shift in the global media landscape requires a redefinition of the under-
standing of the nature of the relationship between media and conflict
today.

Keywords: conflict; digital new media; heteropolarity; mediatisation;

multipolarity; non-state actors; old media; state; war

Introduction
Throughout history, violent conflict has always been mediatised.2 Poems,
sculptures, paintings, frescos, books, theatre plays, newspapers, the tele-
graph, photographs, radio airwaves, television broadcasts, satellites, cinema,
cell phones and*most recently*digital new media platforms all have
depicted and mediatised war. This mediatisation has thereby influenced
how we have viewed and approached violent conflict. Media in this sense
has always played an important role in shaping violent events and our
understanding thereof.

*Sebastian Kaempf is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and
International Studies at the University of Queensland. His research interests are in the ethics and
laws of war in asymmetric conflicts and the mediatisation of war. He is also co-convenor of
TheVisionMachine (http://www.thevisionmachine.com), an interactive platform to interrogate the
intersection between media, war, and peace. <s.kaempf@uq.edu.au>
# 2013 Australian Institute of International Affairs
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 587

Given the long and intricate relationship between media and war (Carruthers
2011; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010), recent claims over the transformative,
even revolutionary nature of today’s digital new media and its alleged impact on
violent conflict should make us pause (Mozorov 2011; Shirky 2008). Has
violence, from Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War or Homer’s
Iliad to the more recent media coverage of the global War on Terror and the
Arab Spring, not always been subject to political interpretation through editing
choices, propaganda, censorship and more or less distorted representations?
How, then, can one plausibly claim that there is anything qualitatively new or
even revolutionary about the nature of digital new media today, let alone the
latter’s relationship with violent conflict?
This article argues that today’s emergence of digital new media technology
constitutes a sea change.3 The rise of this new media technology has resulted in
a structural shift from a multipolar to a heteropolar global media landscape, in
which newly empowered non-state actors and individuals contest the hitherto
state-policed narratives and coverage of war, and in which traditional media
platforms have started to converge with digital new media platforms.
Heteropolarity thus refers to the multiplication and simultaneous diversification
of structurally different media actors. This current transformation of the global
media landscape has, in turn, impacted heavily on and altered the traditional
relationship between media and war, creating the conditions for contemporary
media wars.
The argument presented here is that before the rise of digital new media
technology, ‘old’ media at its heart displayed a fundamental division between
sender and receiver, a division which for a long time had structurally, materially
and politically conditioned the nature of the relationship between ‘old’ media
and war. Within the recently emerging digital new media technology, however,
this age-old separation between sender and receiver has been eroded. Thus,
alongside traditional media platforms, an entirely new form of media technology
has arisen. This is not to argue that traditional media has disappeared (these
media formats remain politically powerful and important), but that it has been
supplemented by a newer, dissimilar form of media technology. This develop-
ment has transformed the hitherto multipolar nature of the old media landscape
and has led to a heteropolar global media landscape, in which the relationship
between media and war has been altered.
In making this argument, the article first discusses the nature of ‘old’,
traditional media platforms by identifying this technology’s structural separa-
tion between sender and receiver. This fundamental separation, the article goes
on to show, conditioned the multipolar nature of the old global mediascape,
which was dominated by multiple yet similar media poles whose structure
largely conditioned the relationship between old media and war. In its second
part, the article examines how the nature of digital ‘new’ media (in particular,
its erosion of the separation between sender and receiver) has undercut and
transformed these very traditional configurations within old media platforms.
588 Sebastian Kaempf

The different structure of digital new media has transformed the global media
landscape into one that is no longer characterised by similarity, but by
difference*not by multipolarity, but by heteropolarity. By exploring how
digital new media poles are forming and old media poles are evolving, the
article examines how this seismic shift in the global media landscape requires us
to redefine our understanding of the nature of the relationship between media
and conflict today.

The structural nature of ‘old’ media and the ‘old’ media landscape
In order to begin examining the nature of conventional ‘old’ media and its
intersection with war, it is helpful to focus our attention back on two early
forms of mass communication: the Renaissance fresco painting and the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century panorama. At first sight, these two media
formats might strike us as odd, antiquated choices, given that we tend to
associate so-called ‘old’ media more strongly and intuitively with the printing
press, radio broadcasters or television stations. Yet, as this section will
illustrate, these paintings and panoramas were not only*at their time*state-
of-the-art media platforms employed to turn war into a form of mass
entertainment (Benjamin 1980, 23; Oettermann 1997). More importantly,
they also functioned along the very same technological and structural lines as
their more familiar successors in nineteenth- and twentieth-century media. They
thereby usefully illustrate important political dimensions of media with regard
to violence that we see again in more recent traditional media platforms, such as
the printing press, radio and satellite television.

Da Vinci and large fresco-painting battle scenes

Like most human beings, Leonardo da Vinci (14521519), one of the greatest
artists, scientists, biologists and inventors, abhorred war because of its ‘beastly
madness’ (Seitz 2008). Yet, growing up in Renaissance Italy with its city states
frequently at war with one another, he could not avoid becoming intricately
drawn into this ‘beastly madness’ in and through his work. As a scientist and
inventor, he designed numerous weapons, including missile grenades and multi-
barrelled machine guns. As an artist, he was commissioned to draw numerous
large frescos on the walls of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, which depicted battle
scenes to commemorate military victories against rival city states, like the
famous Anghiari fresco depicting Florence’s victory over Pisa in 1440 (Da Vinci
2008, 328; see Figure 1).
For him, painting represented the supreme form of all scientific and artistic
endeavours because of its ability to present (‘demonstrate’) all the visual effects
in the world in terms of their underlying causes (Da Vinci 2008, vii). And, as a
teacher, he instructed young artists in the proper art of how painters should
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 589

Figure 1. Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari. Source: http://www.leonardodavinci.net/

the-battle-of-anghiari.jsp

capture and convey the myriad actions, events and emotions associated with
Renaissance-era warfare (Seitz 2008, 68). Some of these detailed instructions
survive today in his notebook in the section entitled ‘The Way to Represent
Battle’ (Da Vinci 2008, 174176). It warrants quoting in depth because of the
way in which it richly illustrates the potential of the fresco as a mechanism
through which to convey the experience of war:

Represent first the smoke of the artillery, mingled in the air with the dust
tossed up by the movement of horses and combatants . . . Let the air be full of
arrows in every direction, some shooting upwards, some falling, some flying
level. The balls from the guns must have a train of smoke following their
course . . . And if you make anyone fallen you must make the mark where he
has slipped on the dust turn into blood-stained mire . . . Make a horse
dragging the dead body of his master . . . Make the conquered and beaten
pale, with brows raised and knit . . . Show someone using one hand as a
shield for his terrified eyes with the palm turned towards the enemy . . .
Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their
fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted . . . You may see
some maimed warrior fallen on the ground, covering himself with his shield,
and the enemy bending down over him and trying to give him the death-
stroke. There might also be seen a number of men fallen in a heap on top of
a dead horse . . . And see to it that you paint no level spot of ground that is
not trampled with blood (Da Vinci 2008, 174176).

In his reflective, artful prose, Da Vinci methodologically catalogued all the things
an artist of his time should have included in a painting that purported to depict
warfare as it really was. And his instructions display the awareness of a master
590 Sebastian Kaempf

artist who understood the centrality of large fresco paintings in visualising and
emotionally representing war to a wider public. This is significant because, prior
to the invention of radio airwaves and the satellite, paintings and frescos
constituted the main medium through which violent conflict was mediatised.

Napoleon, the panorama and war

On June 17, 1787, some two centuries after Da Vinci’s notes on the art of the
fresco of war, Robert Barker received the official patent for a new art form
which was to replace the large fresco painting as the predominant mass
medium: the panorama (Oettermann 1997, 5). Etymologically stemming from
the two Greek words pan (‘all’) and horama (‘viewing’), the panorama was a
technical term describing an enormous painted canvas which reproduced a
360-degree vista that afforded spectators the possibility to relive the experience
of a scenic view from a summit.
As a visual experience, the panorama was one of the first forms of illusionary
space entertainment (Buck-Morss 1992, 22), forming the first virtual mass
medium of the industrial age (Benjamin 1980, 23). With its capacity to liberate
human vision (and to limit and ‘imprison’ it anew through its choice of
representations), it became the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forerunner of
today’s movie and IMAX theatres (Oettermann 1997). It proved so popular
with the bourgeois masses (and profitable for its owners) that it quickly spread
from Leicester Square in London (see Figure 2) and the Champs-Élysées in Paris
to the rest of Europe and throughout North America.

Figure 2. Robert Barker’s panorama in London’s Leicester Square. Source: http://www.lateralart.

com/digital_mural/robert-barkers-panorama-a-room-with-a-view/
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 591

What is most fascinating, however, is how this state-of-the-art medium

became interlinked with politics and, in particular, with war. In 1810, a
panorama in Paris displayed the Battle of Wagram, which Napoleon had won
the previous year (see Figure 3). The emperor came to see it and appeared highly
gratified by his depiction as a military hero. Whether he was motivated by his
depiction or by an immediate appreciation of the propaganda value of
panoramas remains unclear, but he afterwards gave instructions for the
architect Jacques Cellerier to design seven panoramas on the Champs-Élysées,
which were to display glorious French victories from both the Revolutionary era
and the empire (Oettermann 1997, 152). In addition to the exhibitions in Paris,
plans included sending mobile panoramas on a tour through France and its
conquered territories. In the end, his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 meant that
Napoleon’s plans were never carried out. Nevertheless, the political (propa-
gandistic) value of the panorama as a mass industrial-entertainment medium
glorifying war and the prowess and authority of the victors was not lost on
other political leaders. Throughout history, 90 percent of all panoramas ever
built have displayed war themes (Wickens 1978, 424), making the panorama
the precursor of the weekly newsreels on the progress of military campaigns
shown in cinemas during World War II (Oettermann 1997, 152).
Both paintings and panoramas were*at their time*state-of-the-art media
platforms that were employed to turn war into a form of mass-entertainment
spectacle. In this, both mediums displayed the very same technological and
political characteristics as other ‘old’ media platforms that emerged in the form
of the printing press in 1439, the mechanical telegraph in 1794, electromagnetic
waves in 1896, radio after World War I, television after World War II and the
first version of the Internet (Web 1.0), which became available to the public in
1994.

Figure 3. The Battle of Wagram (1809) by Wilhelm Alexander Wolfgang von Kobell. Source:
http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/von-kobell-wilhelm-alexan/die-schlacht-bei-wagram-1.html
592 Sebastian Kaempf

Of course, within the category of the various ‘old’ media platforms, key
differences existed in terms of formats, access, geographical spread, public
accessibility or transmission speed (see Figure 4). For instance, frescos and
panoramas were geographically and spatially fixed, whereas later ‘old’ media
platforms became trans-spatial, thus radically expanding both audience and
accessibility. Da Vinci’s fresco painting could only have been viewed by a
fraction of spectators compared to the masses listening to Churchill’s famous
radio broadcasts during the Blitz and the global viewers who tuned in to follow
the Vietnam War (the first television war) or Cable News Network’s (CNN’s)
Peter Arnett reporting from a hotel rooftop in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf
War. Equally, while the opening of the new panorama in Berlin in 1812
depicting the burning of Moscow only three months after the real event was
celebrated as a sensation in ‘real time’ (Oettermann 1997), it can hardly
compare to the live and instantaneous television broadcasts of 9/11 or ‘Shock

Figure 4. Different ways in which traditional media platforms have reported and represented
conflict. Sources (from left to right): see Figure 1; http://www.cclapcenter.com/2007/04/movies_
for_grownups_triumph_of.html; http://www.peoples.ru/state/journalist/peter_arnett/; see Figure 2;
http://www.tcpalm.com/photos/2010/jan/04/224699/; http://atjason.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/
rundown-september-11-2001-via.html; http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Johann-Lorenz-Rugendas/
The-Burning-Of-Moscow,-15th-September-1812,-1813.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:
TrangBang.jpg; http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-shockandawe.html
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 593

and Awe’ in 2003, which is not to mention the difference that exists between
still images or prints (paintings, photographs and print media) and the moving
images of the newsreel, the cinema and home-owned television sets. On all these
levels, key technological innovations have occurred over time that have
impacted on the way in which conflict has been reported and represented
(Latham 2003).
Most fundamentally, however, and underpinning all these ‘old’ mediums,
there was a structural division between sender and receiver (Rid and Hecker
2009, 6). They were media platforms of mass monologues, one-directionally
transmitting information generated by very small, yet highly specialised and
powerful elites to the receiving masses. For the masses of passive receivers
themselves, the ability to generate and transmit information through active
participation, ‘user-generated content’ or ‘interactivity’ only became a possibility
in 2002 when, due to the emergence of Web 2.0, the technological preconditions
for public media dialogue were created (Rid and Hecker 2009, 67). But until the
advent of the dialogical capacities of digital new media platforms,4 the
separation between sender and receiver in ‘old’ media meant that information
was only transmitted in one direction*from the producer to the consumer.
Thus, prior to the advent of the Web 2.0 digital revolution in 2002, all
conventional media platforms operated along a common axis*that is, the
fundamental structural separation between sender and receiver, between the
producer and the consumer of media (Louw 2005; Rid and Hecker 2009). This
was already present from the time when Thucydides wrote about the war
between Athens and Sparta, Da Vinci drew his canvas fresco and Robert Barker
built the first panorama, to the 2003 real-time television coverage of the invasion
of Iraq. This fundamental separation between sender and receiver means that all
traditional media poles were of an inherently similar type, irrespective of their
differences in age, geographical reach or dissemination speed. The structural
similarities of these poles outweighed their differences and conditioned the
multipolar nature of the old global mediascape*a global media order that
was dominated by the existence of multiple media poles of the same structural
type.
This multipolar old media landscape has had significant ramifications for the
relationship between old media and war. But what are these ramifications and
how do they impact on the broader political dimensions of conflict? It is to these
questions that the article now turns.

War and the multipolar old media landscape

Building, operating and maintaining traditional media platforms (from the
panorama to the mass printing press, the telegraph, radio/television stations and
cinema) was exceedingly expensive and therefore could only be afforded by
those with sufficient financial resources and political power*i.e. the Church,
594 Sebastian Kaempf

princes, sovereigns and, more recently, states and global media corporations
(Benjamin 1980; Münkler 2006b, 7276). Throughout history, therefore,
sovereign states have not only been the primary sponsors, but also*in most
cases*the direct owners of conventional media platforms (Louw 2005; Rid and
Hecker 2009). This intimate relationship between the state and state-owned
traditional media has meant that, in times of war, the latter has regularly
functioned as a highly censored propaganda tool for the former (Carruthers
2011; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Münkler 2006b, 7276).
The most obvious examples of this power relationship can be found in
authoritarian regimes, ranging from Goebbels’ use of the transistor radio, the
Soviet propaganda apparatus under Stalin and the state-owned hate radio
station in Rwanda, to North Korea’s state-owned media. Here, direct
ownership of traditional media platforms has allowed authoritarian regimes
to directly control the dissemination of news. But even in liberal democratic
societies, where the media in recent times has generally been owned by private
citizens or news corporations, and where it has been celebrated as the ‘fourth
estate’ and the guarantor of freedom of speech, independent from government
control (Schultz 1998), the state*in times of war*has maintained a large
amount of control over the production and dissemination of news. Such levels
of government control have traditionally been achieved through a variety of
mechanisms, ranging from outright censorship and denial of access to the
battlefield, to systems of embedded reporting (Carruthers 2011; Conetta
2012). For instance, most democratic states (France since Algeria in the 1950s,
the USA since Vietnam in the 1980s, Israel since Lebanon in 1983 and the UK
since the Falklands War, but also Australia, Germany and Italy) have
systematically started embedding journalists directly within their military
forces (Carruthers 2011, 9698; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Münkler
2006b, 7276).
The reason why media conglomerates have been receptive to such systematic
government controls is twofold. On the one hand, media in democratic countries
has regularly displayed a tendency to voluntarily forgo its scrutinising role in
times of war out of a sense of patriotism (Elter 2005; Louw 2010). On the other
hand, war has become one of the most profitable businesses for corporatised
media companies (Elter 2005). The exclusive coverage of the 1991 Iraq War, for
instance, transformed CNN from a near bankrupt television station into a multi-
billion-dollar business venture (Ottosen 1991). War, in other words, has been a
financially lucrative business. Therefore, for media oligopolies, gaining access to
the battlefield, even at the cost of (self-)censorship, has often been prioritised
over political independence and freedom of speech (Elter 2005). This relatively
intimate relationship between Western governments and traditional media
outlets has meant that, in times of war, the ‘fourth estate’ (Schultz 1998) as a
control mechanism scrutinising states’ conduct of wars has been significantly
compromised (Elter 2005; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010).
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 595

A second dimension of the relationship between traditional media and

governments has been the development of a ‘militaryindustrialmedia
entertainment complex’ (Der Derian 2002). This complex has evolved in
response to the recognition in the epicentres of Western capitals that
contemporary wars are principally media wars*i.e. spectacles that not only
take place on a battlefield under the observing eyes of journalists, but also on the
home front*and that these wars are generally won by the warring faction which
succeeds in using (and thereby manipulating) the media entertainment networks
as part of its military strategy (Münkler 2005). This does not mean that the
traditional media in democratic societies has necessarily lost its political
independence, but that, at times of war, the information it can publish and the
images it can use are*not dissimilarly to authoritarian regimes*oftentimes
controlled by the state (Elter 2005; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Louw 2010).
Facilitating states’ ability to control the mediatisation of their wars has been
the structural separation between sender and receiver that characterises old
media. Agency*or the ability to produce and disseminate news*has rested in
the hands of a very small minority of highly specialised and materially powerful
actors. Traditional media platforms function according to mass industrial
modes of production (Rid and Hecker 2009).5 They are materially vast and
expensive infrastructures that can only be afforded by powerful actors such as
states or corporations. Furthermore, the actual production of news requires a
large pool of highly trained specialists, such as journalists, technicians and
editors. This creates a fundamental separation between sender and receiver*a
separation which endows a small minority with agency whilst reducing the vast
majority of citizens to passive media consumers. This fundamental division
between producers and consumers means that old media platforms create a
news environment of mass monologue where news production and commu-
nication flows in only one direction (Louw 2005). Agency within traditional
media can therefore be seen as clearly lodged with particular elites and a caucus
of ‘professional’ journalists. It is a clearly defined sector of society that is
mandated to produce and disseminate ‘news’. Agency therefore is lodged in a
clearly defined web of material and social relations that limit the range of
participants in this sector, and thus agency.
Limited agency has meant that the number of central media gatekeepers
which governments have to control in order to exert political influence over
how their wars are being mediatised is relatively small. In fact, this traditionally
small number has shrunk dramatically over the last few decades as a result of
oligopolisation*a process whereby (through mergers and hostile takeovers)
progressively fewer individuals or corporations control increasing shares of the
global media market (Louw 2010; Warf 2007). This concentration of
traditional media ownership started in the 1980s and has since seen the rise
of ever larger profit-oriented media conglomerates with a global reach. For
instance, the number of independent television stations in the USA alone has
been reduced from over 100 in the early 1980s to just 7 by 2012 (Rodman
596 Sebastian Kaempf

2008). In Latin America, 85 percent of media today is owned by just 7 news

corporations (‘Listening Post: Latin America’s Media Battlefields’, 2012). In
Australia, the ownership of most traditional media outlets is now shared
between News Corporation, Time Warner and Fairfax.
These media oligopolies have invested their assets across various media
platforms (television, radio, newspapers, publishing houses, music production,
cinema and the Internet) and are global in reach (Turner 2013). For instance, in
2012, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation*the world’s second-largest news
conglomerate (after the Walt Disney Company)*owned 800 media companies
in 50 different countries and had an annual revenue of US$34 billion.6
This concentration of global media ownership has had direct implications for
the quality and diversity of news reporting. Driven primarily by profit interests
and concerns for market shares, rather than by the desire to uphold the highest
journalistic standards and to critically scrutinise government policies, many
media oligopolies have started replacing serious news with infotainment (Louw
2010; Stahl 2010; Turner 2013). This process, which has been the flip side of
oligopolisation, is most visible in the decline of investment in investigative
journalism within ‘old’ media platforms. More than any other area of
journalism, investigative journalism has traditionally symbolised the media’s
self-proclaimed role as the ‘fourth estate’, which scrutinises, questions and
checks government policies (Schultz 1998). But because it requires larger, more
long-term investment, with oftentimes uncertain outcomes, investigative
journalism has become the biggest victim in today’s corporatised global media
landscape (‘Listening Post: Game of Drones’, 2013).
For most Western governments, which are concerned with how their wars are
being represented and visualised, the process of oligopolisation has been good
news. As noted above, it has meant that the number of crucial media
gatekeepers which need to be controlled has dropped dramatically. This
contraction in the distribution of agency in conventional media has not only
restricted the potential for diverse news coverage, but also facilitated the ability
of states to control the nature of war reporting. While this clearly applies to
state-owned media in authoritarian states, it is also of relevance to conventional
media in liberal democracies (Elter 2005). Here, in order to control the
mediatisation of war, governments do not necessarily have to control every
journalist working for a Western media station. Instead, this can be achieved by
exerting sufficient political influence over the chief editors and chief executive
officers.
This is significant because powerful actors throughout history have sought to
control the visualisation and representation of their own wars. Developments in
communications and information technologies have, over the centuries,
provided both opportunities and challenges in this quest. Between the invention
of the printing press and the emergence of satellite television, factors such as
time and space have been increasingly compressed. While most representations
of political violence have been made retrospectively (i.e. taking place after the
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 597

events), innovations in media technology have led to ever more instantaneous

forms of war reporting. Leonardo da Vinci took several months to paint his
famous fresco canvas (Seitz 2008). Battlefront news reports from the Crimean
War took several days before they were received at the news desks of European
capitals (Carruthers 1996, 149). The television footage of the Vietnam War, on
average, took two days before it was watched in US living rooms. In the case of
the 1991 Gulf War, the time lag was still 24 hours. It was not until the events of
9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq that global television coverage of war could
be experienced in real time (Carruthers 2011). In other words, the representa-
tion of war has become instantaneous.
Despite the theoretical separation between democratic governments and the
self-proclaimed ‘fourth estate’, the former have worked hard to regain/retain
the capacity to effectively control the ways in which the latter has represented
war (Carruthers 2011; Elter 2005). The perceived imperative to control the
mediatisation of war is the realisation by Western governments that, for all their
military superiority, their military forces have a key vulnerability: their success
on the battlefield depends on continued domestic support by the ‘hearts and
minds’ of Western publics (Münkler 2006a). In order to create and sustain such
support, most democratic governments have put in place systems of media
management that have, by and large, enabled them to control the visual
representation of their wars on ‘old’ media platforms.
In the case of the USA, for instance, this perceived need to control the (visual)
representation of war stems from the political fallout caused by the Vietnam
War. Here, the prevailing view among key US decision makers was that the war
in Indo-China would have been won if it had not been for the alleged
misrepresentation of the conflict by the US print media, radio and television
networks. As a consequence, the Pentagon subsequently set up the ‘pool system’
and, as noted above, developed ‘embedded journalism’ as a means to manage
the media and to control the (visual) representation of the USA’s wars (Hoskins
and O’Loughlin 2010). By putting in place a system of media management, the
Pentagon regained the ability to control the (visual) representation of US wars
among the US public (and a wider Western audience). Established with the
invasion of Grenada in 1983, this system has continued through the 1991 Gulf
War until today. Over the last four decades, identical developments have been
under way in the Australian, British and Israeli militaries (Carruthers 2011;
Elter 2005).
The management of media representations has been central not only to
creating, but also to sustaining the popular notions of ‘costless wars’ (Ignatieff
2000). In this regard, the 1991 Gulf War constituted the beginning of ‘virtual
cleansing’*a process of sanitising violence that has aimed at ‘overpowering the
mortification of the human body’ (Der Derian 2002, 120). Since then, carefully
selected images conveyed by Western military operations have suggested a
‘grammar of killing’ that avoids the spilling of blood. They present Western
operations as precise, discriminative and clean (Coker 2001). For states,
598 Sebastian Kaempf

therefore, the ability to frame the representation of their military operations via
traditional media as humane, surgical and clean has been essential to creating
and sustaining the legitimacy of warfare in the eyes of the public (Der Derian
2002, 917; Owens 2003). By enlisting publics in virtual and virtuous ways, the
state-policed mediatisation of warfare has not only altered the physical
experience of conflict through the means of technology, but has also sought
to obscure the fact that waging war is still about killing others (Der Derian
2002; Virilio 2002).
This first part of the article has identified the structural separation between
sender and receiver as lying at the heart of traditional media platforms.
Irrespective of the latter’s inherent differences with regard to time, spread and
speed, this structural separation conditioned the nature of the old global media
landscape, which was dominated by the existence of multiple media poles of the
same type. The material and structural nature of this old multipolar media
landscape had significant ramifications for the relationship between old media
and war in that sovereign states have not only been the primary sponsors, but
also*in most cases*the direct owners and controllers of conventional media
platforms (Rid and Hecker 2009). This intimate relationship between the state
and traditional media has meant that states have enjoyed a near monopoly over
the use of traditional industrial mass-media platforms, in particular in times of
war against non-state actors. This structural, material and technological
monopoly has allowed states (authoritarian and democratic alike) to largely
control the media representations of their wars, effectively utilise these media
platforms to legitimate their own war efforts, win ‘hearts and minds’, and build
and sustain popular support for their wars.

Digital new media and the Balkanisation of the global media landscape
The nature of this relationship between traditional media and conflict is of
significance, given that, since 1945, there has been a gradual, yet fundamental,
shift from symmetric interstate wars to asymmetric conflicts waged between
state and non-state actors. Today, the vast majority of conflicts around the
globe are asymmetric conflicts between state and non-state actors (Smith 2005).
In those conflicts, states have held a key advantage over their non-state
adversaries both in terms of their military capabilities and in terms of their
monopoly over existing industrial mass-media platforms (Münkler 2006a,
2006b). In other words, states have*for a long time*appreciated and enjoyed
the ability to control the media representation of their wars against non-state
actors.
This structural situation, however, has changed fundamentally with the
emergence of digital new media technology in 2002 (Kaempf 2009). The rise of
the latter has resulted in a structural shift from a hitherto multipolar to a
heteropolar media landscape, one that is no longer characterised by similarity,
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 599

but by difference*not by multipolarity, but by heteropolarity (Copeland 2009;

Der Derian 2013). This multiplication and simultaneous diversification of
structurally different media actors has heavily impacted on and altered the
traditional relationship between old media and war. In this brave new media
world, the latest technological quantum leap has empowered non-state actors
and individuals alike to be able to contest state-policed war narratives, thereby
creating the conditions for today’s wars to be waged*by both sides*in and
through media platforms.
Unlike conventional mass-media platforms, digital new media technology
breaks down the age-old division between sender and receiver. Due to its cheap
and user-friendly nature, together with its interconnectivity, simultaneity,
ubiquity and interactivity, this has resulted in the emergence of newly super-
empowered non-state and individual media actors alongside traditional media
actors.7 Thus, there has been a massive broadening and diversification of the
number of actors who can produce media and utilise media platforms as part of
their war-fighting strategy. Furthermore, digital new media technology is much
harder to control by state actors, and thereby has offered non-state actors a
strategic tool to break the state’s hitherto monopoly over the framing and visual
representation of warfare. In contrast to the old multipolar media landscape,
where all media actors were of the same structural type, the emerging media
heteropolarity has empowered different types of actors at different hierarchical
levels (including states, non-state actors and individuals) to mediatise conflict.
In the heteropolar mediascape, these diverse media poles share little in common,
as the material and structural differences between them far outweigh their
similarities. Digital new media technology, in this sense, has fragmented, or
Balkanised, the old global media landscape (Münkler 2006b; Sparrow 2013).
Tracing the contours of heteropolarity and its implications for the relation-
ship between conflict and media reveals two major developments: on the one
hand, entirely new media poles are forming, whilst, on the other, old media
poles are evolving. Each of these two developments has impacted on the
mediatisation of war.
The first development*i.e. the formation of entirely new types of media
actors*has afforded a broad range of non-state actors the opportunity to
become directly involved in the mediatisation of conflict. An early example of
this development can be found in the Zapatistas, one of the first groups to
successfully employ the Internet as a means to rally global political support for
their cause alongside their military struggle against the Mexican government
(Gray 1997). Other, more recent examples of this development can be found in
terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Jamal Islamyah using
various digital new media platforms to debate and refine their strategies, recruit
sympathisers into their ranks and visually counter their enemies’ media
campaigns. Yet, they can also be found amongst the protestors in Iran,
Thailand, Burma, Tunisia, Egypt or Libya, who have rallied support and
organised themselves against their governments through Twitter and Facebook.
600 Sebastian Kaempf

Citizen journalists, from the famous Baghdad blogger and the Occupy Wall
Street movement to Anonymous and the Syrian citizens, who*in the absence of
traditional foreign media in their country*have generated most of the footage
of the civil war, have been able to directly lend their voices to the mediatisation
of today’s conflicts. Other digital platforms, such as Wikileaks, have demon-
strated the potentials of whistle-blowing in a digitally wired world, whilst social
media channels like Democracy Now! have added critical investigative voices to
the media airwaves. The humanitarian non-governmental organisation Save
Darfur has teamed up with Google and Facebook to visually map and bring
public attention to the mass atrocities in Darfur, whilst the infamous 30-minute
clip ‘Kony 2012’, released by the activist group Invisible Children, Inc. on
March 5, 2012, yielded the fastest-growing viral video of all time, attracting 94
million viewers on YouTube and another 16.6 million on Vimeo within six
months of its release. Private organisations like the US-based Minuteman
Project use social media sites to patrol the MexicanUS border in search of
illegal immigrants, while US soldiers placed images of the abuses in Abu Ghraib
onto their personal websites, thereby triggering a global media shit storm. All
these non-state actors can have a view, can have an image and can express a
perspective outside traditional media outlets.
At the same time, digital new media has also allowed states and conventional
militaries to become direct media producers, providing them with a news
presence independent of the traditional media gateways. For instance, the Israeli
army banned all foreign media from its 2008 military campaign in Lebanon and
instead conducted its entire media campaign (including press conferences)
through social media sites. During the Iraq War, the Pentagon set up its own
YouTube channels and, in response to the Abu Ghraib scandal, introduced
miliblogs*a platform through which media-trained US soldiers report their war
experiences to the general public. In 2008, the Department of State ventured
into a new form of digital surrogate warfare. In partnership with Google,
Facebook, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, CNN, the National Broadcasting
Company and the Columbia Law School, it founded the Alliance of Youth
Movements*an initiative which has since trained global youth groups on how
to use digital media ‘to promote freedom and justice’ in the face of oppressive
and authoritarian regimes (Louw 2013). The Syrian and Iranian regimes
successfully used Facebook and Twitter as surveillance tools to identify and
subsequently arrest protestors. Furthermore, the Pentagon has developed free
online first-person shooter games, such as America’s Army, as a way to
successfully recruit young men into military service (Stahl 2010). It has also
started using digital new media not only for surveillance and drone warfare, but
also to treat soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Far from being an exhaustive list, these examples allow for a brief illustration
of how digital new media technology has afforded entirely new media actors the
opportunity to directly generate and disseminate news without having to go
through established traditional media ‘filters’. Yet, alongside the formation of
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 601

these new media poles, old media poles are evolving at the same time. Digital
new media technology, in other words, has not left traditional media outlets
unaffected. Besides triggering significant budget crises amongst old media
platforms, including ever growing numbers of outright closures (especially in
the newspaper sector), traditional media has evolved by incorporating and
drawing on digital new media tools and resources. Here, traditional media
today oftentimes draws directly on footage taken from the Internet*be this in
its coverage of the Syrian civil war, the Iranian post-election protests in 2009 or
the political crisis in Thailand. And television channels directly include online
video statements from their viewers in prominent shows like Al Jazeera’s
flagship program The Listening Post.
The impact of this dual development (new media poles forming and old ones
evolving) on the mediatisation of conflict has been to fragment it, making it very
hard for parties to a conflict to generate a uniform perspective and for media
audiences to be presented with a monological view of the truth. Instead, the
mediatisation of today’s conflicts is generated by a whole range of people: from
accredited, embedded professional journalists, to terrorist organisations, street
protestors or ‘citizen journalists’ who are putting out press releases and
uploading images and videos; from governments which are putting out pre-
produced packages explaining their side of the story, to soldiers who are writing
military blogs presenting their own point of view from the battlefield itself and
posting photographs on Flickr and Facebook. At the same time, traditional news
organisations are facing serious budget pressures due to the ever growing
popularity of alternative news media, whilst still trying to provide important, but
expensive, boots-on-the-ground reporting from these war zones. In short, digital
new media has introduced a wide range of voices into the mediatisation of war.
On a strategic level, then, digital new media technologies have become a
strategic force-multiplier and potential game-changer for non-state actors in
their wars against states. They have levelled the media playing field by
empowering previously disadvantaged non-state actors to reconceptualise and
appropriate public media as a battleground. They have afforded non-state
actors the ability to contest the conventional media representation of wars
waged by states without having to go through the ‘filters’ of accredited news
organisations. They have empowered non-state actors to undermine the
legitimation strategies of their adversaries’ media campaigns by broadcasting
images depicting the cruel and bloody reality of violence. In essence, they have
enabled non-state actors to employ media technology as a virtual weapon to
win the ‘hearts and minds’ of publics on whose sustained support military
commitment often hinges.
This development has started to transform the experience of war, for it allows
for the production of competing virtual realities (Hegghammer 2006; Weimann
2006). To paraphrase James Der Derian (2013), the hitherto one-sided media
spectacle of war has been replaced by a war of spectacles. This is why, for the
first time, we are witnessing true media wars, or what Paul Virilio (2002, ix) calls
602 Sebastian Kaempf

‘cybernetic wars of persuasion and dissuasion’, where the prime strategic

objectives are no longer exclusively the elimination of the enemy’s military
forces, but also the (re)shaping of public opinion (Der Derian 2002; McInnes
2002, 69). With state and non-state actors both vying for ‘hearts and minds’,
today’s transformed global media sphere has become an important, even
decisive, conduit and arena in warfare. As a result, some of the most critical
battles in today’s wars have not only been fought in the mountains of
Afghanistan, the Libyan deserts, the streets of Baghdad or the urban centre of
Aleppo, but also in and through a range of different media platforms: in
television, radio and print newsrooms, and*just as importantly*in various
Internet forums, through Twitter, YouTube, jihadist websites, chat rooms and
the blogosphere (Bergen 2002; Louw 2003). This means that while states, until
very recently, were able to expose their citizens to a one-sided and highly
sanitised representation of war, they now find themselves waging an unprece-
dented virtual war alongside the physical/‘real’ wars on the ground. The
heteropolar media landscape, in other words, has become a medium of
contemporary war.

Conclusion
The rise of digital new media technology has transformed the global media
landscape. Gone is the old multipolar mediascape made up of structurally
similar media entities. In its place, a new heteropolar mediascape has emerged
as a result of the multiplication and simultaneous diversification of structurally
different media actors. Today’s global media landscape is no longer charac-
terised by similarity, but by difference*not by multipolarity, but by hetero-
polarity. In other words, digital new media has fragmented, or Balkanised, the
traditional mediascape.
Triggering and driving this transformation is digital new media’s erosion of
the age-old separation between sender and receiver which has laid at the heart
of traditional media technology and facilitated a largely state-controlled
mediatisation of conflict. Digital new media has thereby afforded newly
empowered non-state actors and individuals the ability to contest these hitherto
state-policed war narratives and coverage.
In the context of war, this development has introduced a wide range of new
voices into the mediatisation of war, making it very hard to get a uniform
perspective and to obtain a monological view of contemporary conflicts. State
and non-state actors alike, alongside their military engagement on the physical
battlefields, are increasingly waging war in and through (digital new) media
platforms. This means that today’s transformed global media landscape has
become an important, even decisive, conduit and arena in warfare, as some of
the most critical battles in today’s wars have not only been fought on the
physical battlefields, but also in and through a range of different old and digital
 The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape 603

new media platforms. This means that state and non-state actors alike now find
themselves waging an unprecedented virtual media war alongside the physical/
‘real’ wars on the ground. Media technology, in other words, has become a
medium of contemporary war.

Notes
1. I would like to thank Roland Bleiker, Madeline Carr, Matt McDonald, Jacinta O’Hagan,
Andrew O’Neil, the other two members of the Woolloongabba Writers’ Collective and the
reviewers for their critical and helpful comments on various earlier versions of this article.
2. ‘Mediatisation’ refers to the integral part media plays in the actual planning and conduct of
war. In contrast to the term ‘mediation’, it denotes an understanding of the extent to which
media technologies have become such a central part of the practices of warfare that the latter
cannot be fathomed unless one accounts for the role of media within it. For a detailed account
of the ‘mediatisation’ of war, see Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010, 319).
3. This article draws a distinction between ‘old’ (traditional, conventional) and ‘digital new’
media. When referring to ‘old’ media, the terminologies ‘old’, ‘traditional’ and ‘conventional’
are used interchangeably, indicating a semantic, not a substantive, difference.
4. ‘Dialogical’, stemming from the noun ‘dialogue’, refers to the two-way communication/
exchange which has been structurally enabled through the advent of digital media technology.
5. There have always been, of course, smaller independent media organisations or newspapers
produced by lobby groups or political organisations to promote their causes. However, they
do not dominate the traditional mediascape. In addition, the same dynamic of the separation
between producer and audience applies.
6. See the News Corporation website at: http://www.21cf.com/Investor_Relations/2012_ar/.
7. As just one example of this new phenomenon, by 2011, 72 hours of video was being uploaded
onto YouTube every minute (see YouTube 2013).

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