In coming to an understanding with one another about their situation, participants in communication stand in a cultural tradition which they use and at the same time renew; in coordinating their actions via intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims, they rely on memberships in social groups and at the same time reinforce the integration of the latter;…Under the functional aspect of reaching understanding communicative action serves the transmission and renewal of cultural knowledge; under the aspect of coordinating action, it serves social integration and the establishment of group solidarity; under the aspect of socialization, it serves the formation of personal identities.
-Jürgen Habermas

In a state-controlled media, how would the war correspondence have looked any different?
-Eugene Jarecki

The first casualty of war is truth
-Aeschylus

John Santos spoke of the “two dialogues” between global media and IR. It is impossible to contribute to global media without affecting international relations just as it is impossible to change the course of international relations without changing its representation in the global media. They are ontologically inter-related, dealing with the same “stuff” in different ways. As the main topic of interest in both fields, wars and war coverage are of central importance. How has the history of war reportage affected the current war-correspondence in the global media? To answer that first question, we must first satisfy ourselves with an explanation of how the media (both global and national) is (inter?) related to the development of a national identity. To this fundamental question, we must look to Habermas for insight. I argue that it is through the media that the modern nation learns to identify with a common intersubjective reality. In this way, the nation takes force as an ideological whole. The national intersubjective consciousness is a force which the reportage of war both shapes and to which it responds, filling its historically constructed role. I first argue for the link between national media and national identity, and then proceed to investigate the place of war correspondence in this mix.
Underlying this justification is the idea of collective intentionality. Taking a methodologically holistic stance, John Searle argues that the social awareness of collective action is a “we-feeling” which constructs an important contextual element of our social reality. This we-feeling is a constitutive fact; it does not cause one thing or another, rather it gives a certain meaning to actions taken in the context of the social fact. This is important because it is a subjective notion; the objective fact of collective intentionality means something subjectively different to each member involved. This is how Searle accounts for the creation of a national consciousness as a social phenomenon. Taking this concept further, Habermas posits the principle of communicative action as a societal organizing principle.
For Habermas, humans are social beings who understand their social identities in large part through communication. Communicative action is a special type of communication which is aimed at reaching a mutual, intersubjective understanding of the social world in which the action takes place. Thus, communicative action is aimed at creating a mutually acceptable understanding of the objective world surrounding the participants based on an incorporation of each of their subjective interpretations of that world. The process consists of speech acts that coordinate the actors in constructing a collective, intersubjective, shared understanding of a reality that means something different to every person. He stops short of applying his theory to the national media, reserving his theory for the realm of legal theory.
While it is a questionable logical move, a re-application of his theory to the national media allows us to view it as a force that helps constitute a national consciousness. Applying Habermas’ critical theory allows us to see the media as the producer of a wider community of dialogue, reconstituting the state as intersecting many networks simultaneously to which the state is accountable but which may also affect and help reconstitute the state. It is clear that the state plays a key role in the intersection of networks that makes up a national media but what that role is can vary. David Campbell writes that when the myth of nationalism intersects the media, it promotes the message of alignment of identity, territory, and the state. This thought is a gentle segue between the critical theories of IR (or political science) and the post-modern.
The addition of postmodern IR theory allows us to see the media as a rhetorical tool in the exercise of power. Richard Devetak writes that the current discourses and practices of the security elite are actually a way of excluding competing dialogues, assigning themselves a superior moral space. By moralizing their public discourse, security and foreign policy elites can advance their own ‘politico-military’ objectives which “advance national security interests at the same time that they reconstitute political identities.” Thus, according to Devetak, states “rely upon violence to constitute themselves as states. ” It is in the intersecting of critical and post-modern theories of IR and political science that the answer to the first question can be seen.
The relationship between the ownership of the media and the national identity which the media helps constitute is one in which the state has the ability to exercise power. The political elites who make the news and the social and media elites who portray the news play a feedback position to the national collective intentionality of society. However, while it is definitionally a passive process where the interdependence of opinions constructs a collective identity from the bottom-up, the top-down influence on the media is a distortion, changing it to further the purpose of the elites in control of it. Since, according to the critical theorists, the media is our method of understanding our society, distorting it and infusing an alternate message subsequently confuses the process of social identity-formation. Therefore, when the state begins to emphasize its reliance upon violence it “narrativises” its own conception of reality, giving social meaning to ideas that did not necessarily have a purely social origin in the national sense. David Campbell writes, “The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state’s identity or existence: it is its condition of possibility. While the objects of concern change over time, the techniques and exclusions by which those objects are constituted as dangers persist.” At the intersection of the state’s elite’s control over the media and the issue of international violence is the heart of war-correspondence question.
Michel Foucault writes that we must understand how we have, “made the present seem like a normal and natural condition.” He means to say that it is his goal to deconstruct our construction of the present in a way to make it seem consistent with the past. War-correspondence does just what Foucault indicts: it models itself to fit into the paradigm of acceptable war correspondence from the past. In WWII, it was a catalyst for the troops and the American public in Why We Fight. In Jarecki’s Why We Fight, one of his protagonists mentions that the government learned in Vietnam that the media would hurt them in a war in which they took on many casualties. Therefore, the government tried to cut this type of discourse out of the public sphere as much as possible in that war and in future wars. The government elite, along with the economic elite in control of the media exercise their power by limiting the discourse of violence to pro-national rhetoric as much as possible. In Operation Desert Storm, the American public was flooded with images of smart bombs scoring direct hits on military targets. In Operation Iraqi Freedom the American public saw the same images. But what would a double reading, in Derrida’s terms, show us here?
The two readings are starkly contradictory. On a first reading, the government/elite’s text achieves a stability effect by bombarding the country with images of bombs raining down on Baghdad and American tanks screaming through the desert encountering little opposition. The emphasis is on effective technology which saves American lives. Exposing elements of internal tension, the second reading of this text suggests the purposive nature of this presentation. The newspapers and news stations kept a daily tab during OIF of how many American soldiers were killed. Yet the media never showed this graphically. It was always a digit. Visually, Americans were confronted by a powerful-looking military with effective advanced technology but in the margins, lacking visual emphasis, was always the reality of American soldiers being killed. The performative contradiction between these two readings is quite clear. The dialogue created by war correspondence is limited in its nature because the messages sent have to go through a filter of national power. In the information age when state jurisdiction does not extend as far as cross-border information technology, the issue becomes an international war of networks and images.
Behind the military campaigns and the terrorist training camps, there is a deeper ideological war. Jarecki described an “asymmetry in the use of terror” which complements the asymmetry in the use of military force on the part of the US. Pointing out a deeper level, Der Derian writes, “A fearful symmetry is also at work, at an unconscious, possibly pathological level, a war of escalating and competing and imitative oppositions, a mimetic war of images…A battle of imitation and representation” where the two others, conscious of each other, try and define themselves in a social sense through the global media. The politico-economic elites in the West unleash their message to the world, using the same kind of distorted war-coverage employed at home but meant for a more universal audience. The media gurus of the jihad employ their best efforts to define themselves in relation to the Western media. These actors are locked in a campaign of networks where they must each intersect the international media and informational/ideational networks in order to explain themselves to a world audience, the enmeshing network.
So how do the origins of war reportage circumscribe its current nature? Jacques Derrida writes that, “The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalize…on a national level or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation.” Taking Jarecki’s interpretation of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), it is clear that the traditional role of war coverage as a means of eliciting a national will to fight by glorifying the troops and demonizing the enemy, laid the framework for the modern concept of war coverage. Der Derian argues that we have encountered a fifth pillar to Jarecki’s four-tiered MIC (military, industry, congress, think-tanks): the media-as-war-correspondent. While in general the media is a reflection of social attitudes and collective intentionality that is at best marginally distorted by the politico-economic elites, during war-time it is at best commandeered. There does not have to be a formal propaganda media arm of the government for it to have an affect. The politico-economic elites exercise their influence over the media to limit the realm of the discussable: exiling deaths of national soldiers and other unpleasant images from the public view. It sanitizes the visual and replaces it with exciting footage of powerful, life-saving technology. Thus the types of media chosen are those that are conducive to the desired message: graphic images of victory and a dialogue of dominance and righteousness. The global media is under enlistment in the war of networks and images.
If the “anagogic” meaning of Why We Fight ’06 is to ask why humanity has wars, then the answer that is at least specific to this American society is that there is just too much money in it to not have war. In some ways the newest, but in many other ways one of the oldest, arsenal in the MIC is the media. Capitalizing on advances in military technology, the politico-economic elites harness the visual capacity of the new global media to spread their visual images on a network projecting power and militaristic benevolence through technology. Santos posited that the, “intricate interaction between political forces and media has become a new political forum. They are becoming, on a historical level, inseparable.” The nature of war correspondence cannot be understood without understanding how a national identity is in part constituted by self-reflection through the media. It is through their influence on this socializing force that the elites of MIC try to further their private goals in the guise of the national goals. By pouring a little poison into the public drinking water, so to say, through the medium of war-correspondence, private interest gets inserted into the “transmission and renewal of cultural knowledge… social integration… [and the formation] of personal identities,” as well as national and become part of the society’s collective intentionality.

What challenges do the following pose to the nation-state: Empire, empire of signs, empire of circumstance?

The term nation-state implies corresponding boundaries of nations and states, however, as this is not often the case, for purposes of clarity I will disregard the “nation” orientation and focus on the state. In answering the question, the first task at hand is to clarify that the state is, or at least will in the following argument be what Weber described as the “human community which within a defined territory successfully claims for itself the monopoly of legitimate physical force” (Weber, Max. “Politics and the State” from Whimster, Sam ed. The Essential Weber. Routledge: New York. 2004. p.131). Politics, by the definition provided by Weber, is thus “the leadership or the influencing of the leadership, of a political group, or what we now call the state” (Weber, Max. “Politics and the State” from Whimster, Sam ed. The Essential Weber. Routledge: New York. 2004. p.131). Since the term “empire” is used to describe all three of the potential challengers, it is also helpful to define: empire refers to the object of imperial rule, that being the rule of an emperor, or in the absence of an emperor, simply “supreme political dominion”. Accordingly, the Weberian state can be called an empire as it exercises supreme dominion within its territory. In order for one of the three other forms of empire to challenge the empire of the state, a new politics would have to be defined in which a human community is not constituted and governed by use of force, but by some other means. None of these three empires realistically propose such a change.

Hardt and Negri define their Empire as distinct from the empire of the state, meaning that its dominion is not the same dominion of force used by the state. At first glance, the challenge of Hardt and Negri’s Empire would seem to set “supreme political control” in opposition to “the monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. Actually Hardt and Negri’s Empire, according to their accounts is more than this traditional understanding of empire. In contrast to generic empire, their Empire is “a global order, a new logic and structure of rule – in short a new form of sovereignty” in contrast to the sovereignty of the state (i.e. the monopoly on legitimate use of force in given territory). However, they make sure to emphasize that it is not sovereignty that has changed, but its form. Indeed, immediately after defining Empire, a whole paragraph is devoted to the explanation that sovereignty has not even declined but is alive and well in regulatory mechanisms that continue to buttress human interaction. Instead of providing agency to states, sovereignty is now embodied in a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule”. To unravel the argument, consider that they argue that “supremacy of authority” (the definition of sovereignty, “sovereignty”. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online). must decentered and divorced from territory. This requires that supreme authority exist “decentered”, but at the same time not as plural supreme authorities. The paragraph goes on to identify the existence of a juridical world order, meaning that there is a single body of laws ordering the world. In other words, Empire refers to a single polity, with the ability to order the world, and the laws to justify that ordering. Remember that in the definition of state as the sole (monopolistic) wielder of legitimate force, much of the definition rests on the notion of legitimacy. Legitimate refers to functioning by the law, law being “a rule of conduct imposed by authority” (“law” OED online). The authority most likely being the state. The state is the polity with the ability to control its territory and the laws to justify the control, very much like Hardt and Negri’s Empire except without the term “global” or :world” inserted. Perhaps Empire can be explained as a primitive world state; their new dominion preserves existing notions of sovereignty, so that even if the agents change, the functional category of state perseveres. Their Empire may threaten existing states, but not the continued existence of states in general.

The empire of signs, the influence or dominion of signs on their human subjects, while posing a challenge to existing political power structures, simultaneously empower the maintenance of power, and do not challenge the existence of political dominion as we know it. If the state does continue to exist, the challenge of the empire of signs is a veritable challenge that it must face, as it always has. The term “empire of signs” refers to the dominion exercised by signs, the effect by which human society is determined by its means of communicating information, a process of which in many cases we may not be conscious. Human society requires sign, because without at least some kind of rudimentary language individuals would not be able to coordinate and cooperate with each other. Organization itself is infused with the exercise of dominion: to “organize” literally means to “make an organ of”, that is, to assign the subject a function as a part of the corporate entity, and in the case of incorporating societies, subordinating the free individual to the corporate interests of the whole – society. Within the “chasm between utterance and meaning” as Professor Santos described it, any presentation of information controls presenter and presented, presenter by forcing cognitive processes to translate into coherent language, presented by captivating the mind which could alternatively dwell on any number of other subjects. Nonetheless, the empire of signs does not especially threaten the empire of the state. While language and signs may challenge powers-that-be, they simultaneously perpetuate existing hierarchy. An flag will continue to strike a chord in the hearts of militant chauvinists, but will simultaneously inspire their political opponents, who wave the flag in the name of contrary actions. The immensity of empire of signs (in Barthes’ book Empire of Signs the “empire of signifiers is so immense, so in excess of speech”, signs from use of chopsticks, the making of sukiyaki, pachinko play, bowing) favors the more skillful agent, the actor who can align its power with his/her own ambitions. The empire of signs may challenge those human beings exercising power, but it does not challenge the human exercise of power itself.

Nor does the empire of circumstance, which although doubtlessly causing sleepless nights to rulers worldwide, may challenge and depose particular states, but will not challenge the political dominion of states at large. Nagging the powers-that-be and perhaps never eliminated are the possibility of events unforeseen, the power of chance, events “outside the engineering and imaginary of the plan” (Der Derian, James. “Decoding the National Security Strategy of the United States of America”. boundary 2. 30.3. 2003. p. 26) The term “empire of chance” captures the idea “that circumstances, rather than hope and abstraction, have the final say in shaping our lives, praxis and experience” (Hill, Christopher. “World Opinion and the empire of circumstance”. International Affairs. 72.1. (1996). p. 112). Dominion of chance has always threatened those in power, just as it has aided those aspiring for it, however, by reducing their agency it belittles the sense of reasoning and planning in the first place. But ultimately, chance can only effect power when planners allow possible contingencies and anomalies to fall outside the plan. Addressing the same subject, Machiavelli likens Fortune “to one of these violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings”, averting her wrath is seemingly beyond the agency of men. But he adds that “it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging”. Fortune “where virtue has not been put in order to resist her”, meaning that the empire of circumstance is really only a positive term for the planner’s inadequacy (Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 1985. pp. 98-99). The empire of circumstance effects politics (and hence the state) only as far as it is allowed to exist; the wiser the prince (planner) the narrower the margin of error, and the more negligible the empire of circumstance. Progress and democratization of technology increase the speed with which the powerful must react to a crisis, be it an unexpected missile attack, a sex scandal or spread of disease, before they are deposed. Conversely these technologies are at the disposal of the powerful as well. Just as video technology allows for the distribution of bin Laden speeches, even more sophisticated technology disseminates Scott McClellan’s press briefings in response. While the empire of circumstances occasionally topple (think of Richard III’s horse) and certainly pester states (consider the political ramifications of Hurricane Katrina for the Bush administration), they do not challenge statehood, in the concept of power exercised over others.

The state will exist as long as human society is founded upon violence and force, or to depict the rosier side of the same coin, upon rights and the executive power to protect them. Hobbes’ Leviathan expresses the foundational place of violence in human society, from the disorganized violence of the “miserable condition of Warre” to the organized violence of socialized life in which “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe” (Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York. 1988. pp.87-89). Refutation of Hardt and Negri’s Empire as a challenge to states only expresses that force is still paramount in the maintenance of society (as Hardt and Negri agree) so that Empire is not a challenge to state, but if anything, a new state. While the empires of signs and circumstance are not subordinate to state dominion, acting for and against powers-that-be, they do not establish the same dominion over individuals and cannot substitute in the political function of the state. Politics will include the empires of signs and circumstance, but only as factors “influencing the leadership”, not as the leadership itself.

Question: How has the relationship between the military and the media evolved from the Cold War to the War on Terror?

The battle between the flag and the first amendment has raged since the first days of American independence, yet this debate is always infused with new energy and furor in times of war. The historical evolution of the relationship between the military and the media has been defined by this ideological polemic, as the primacy of national security versus freedom of speech has been a dominant force in the nation’s political discourse over the past fifty years (and, as evidenced by the recent controversy over President Bush’s domestic surveillance program, continues into the present as well.) A definitive conclusion as to the way in which this relationship has evolved, however, will ultimately depend upon the way in which the fundamental roles and responsibilities of these two actors—the military and the media—are defined.
This paper employs a fairly loose definition of “military,” referring more broadly to what could be more accurately described as “military interests,” or even “interests of the state.” Thus, the role of the military is fairly self-evident—to maintain national security, to defend the interests of the state, and to protect its citizens.
The role of the media, however, is a more complex issue, and one that is much more subjective in nature. The media, unlike the military, is not a single, unified entity, and thus the role, interests, and goals of the media are altered depending upon the context of the time, the specific media outlet, and the medium that is being employed. This paper discusses two separate perspectives on the role and responsibility of the media, each of which leads to a fundamental alteration in the way in which the interaction between the military and the media is characterized and the way in which this relationship has evolved.

In 1951 a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune began to question reports of military misconduct during the Korean War. Rather than refute or explain away the charge, the Army officer being interviewed snapped “don’t you forget which side you’re on.” Whether fighting communists, drug lords, or terrorists, there has been a steady “friend/enemy” dichotomy throughout the political discourse of the past fifty years, and this first perspective defines the role of the media within the context of this division. The argument follows that the media is a national actor, and thus should be employed in a ‘patriotic’ manner—the media should, so to speak, “get on the right side.” In this case, the interests of the military and the media are more effectively aligned—the media and the military are both working to increase the security, and thus the success, of the state. From this perspective, the evolution of the relationship between the media and the military has been one of increasing cooperation and alignment—especially following the turmoil and controversy of the Vietnam years.
Throughout the Cold War and into the present, examples abound of the collaboration between the media and the military as both work towards the common goal of enhancing the strength and security of the nation. This can be a conscious collaboration, such as the decision of the New Republic editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to suppress reports of an impending US-sponsored invasion of Cuba—a decision which Schlesinger described as “a patriotic act which left me oddly uncomfortable.” Yet this collaboration may also take a less explicitly supportive form—such as the report that most cartoon shows throughout the Cold War “implicitly introduced children to the superpower struggle between virtuous and righteous Americans and godless, evil communists.”
Politicians in the past and in the present have made patriotic appeals to the press in an effort to either expose or conceal information in the name of the greater good of the state. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association describing the way in which the Soviet enemy was able to glean crucial information from national media sources. He ended the speech with the declaration that “every newspaper now asks itself with respect to every story: ‘Is it news”’ All I suggest is that you now add the question: ‘Is it in the interest of national security?”
Donald Rumsfeld recently made a similar appeal to the patriotic sensibilities of the press, presenting the media as a “battlefield” to be won and thus an extension of the greater war effort. In a speech given at the Truman library a few weeks ago, the Secretary stated “in many ways, many critical battles in the War on Terror will be fought in the news rooms and the editorial boards.”
The presentation of the media as a ‘patriotic’ national actor stems not only from external pressures, but also emerges out of the patriotic sensibilities of the correspondents themselves—especially in situations in which soldiers and reporters live, travel, and face danger together. In these situations, the line between military and media is often blurred; one journalist describes of his fellow correspondents that “the dearest wish of a lot of them was to kill a Korean. They’d cradle their weapons in their arms and say ‘today I’ll get me a gook.’”
In more recent wars, the technique of having journalists “embedded” with military units has been revived, in which reporters join a unit for training through deployment, combat, and the journey home; journalists may even wear a uniform. An earlier war correspondent embedded with the British army in World War I described the consequences of such a relationship; “we identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field… We wiped out of our mind all thought of personal scoops and all temptation to write one word which would make the task of officers and men more difficult or dangerous. There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors.” Journalist Philip Knightly reports that a similar loss of objectivity can be seen in reports from reporters embedded with units today in Iraq—“no matter how determined embedded correspondents may have been to maintain their distance and objectivity,” he explains, “once the war had started, almost without exception, they soon lost all distinction between soldier and correspondent and began to use the pronoun “we” in their reports.”
Thus, through a combination of patriotic appeals to the media, self-censorship, and outright government censorship, the media as a ‘patriot’—acting in conjunction with the government and against external threats—has produced a relationship of increasing cooperation and alignment between the military and the media.

Patriotism, however, may take many forms, and there is an alternative interpretation of the role of the media which views the press not as an instrument of the military but as an instrument of unbiased truth. When viewed from this perspective, the historical evolution of the relationship between the military and the media assumes an entirely new form, and the symbiotic relationship gives way to two separate sets of interests that are often diametrically opposed. Rumsfeld, in a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations declared that in the media battle between terrorists and the United States, the US has the advantage because “quite simply, truth is on our side and ultimately, in my view, truth wins out.”
In reality, however, truth is not always on “our side,” at least in terms of winning over public opinion both domestically and abroad. From this perspective, the interests of the military and the media are often mutually exclusive, and the clash of the two differing sets of goals inevitably results in a struggle for dominance. Defined in this way, the evolution of this relationship has produced a media that is subservient to the military interests of the state.
While there was a substantial amount of censorship during the Korean War and into the early 60’s, throughout the course of the Vietnam the United States government began to lose control over the images and stories that came out of Vietnam and flowed into the homes of American families all across the nation. In the earlier years of the war, correspondents often mimicked the language and style of WWII reporting, and Homer Bigart of the New York Times Magazine wrote that “we seem to be regarded by the American mission as tools of our foreign policy.”
Yet over time, spurred on by political and military blows such as the Tet Offensive, the media began to break with the official military line and present their own portrait of the war. Images of napalmed children and burning huts were displayed alongside stories of American war atrocities such as the massacre at My Lai, and as public opinion turned against the war the goals of the media and the goals of the military began to wildly diverge. Correspondents were charged responsible for the failing war effort, and Asia expert Robert Elegant declared that “never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media—no less stringent a term will serve—sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.”
From this perspective, the media was not a battlefield to be won from the enemy, but an adversary in and of itself. Drawing upon the lessons of Vietnam, in 1983 no correspondents were allowed into Grenada, and the press was muzzled in the Panamanian invasion as well. Throughout Gulf War I and the series of wars waged in the former Yugoslavia, the military was able to control the way in which information flowed to the press and was subsequently disseminated to the American public and the rest of the world. The military had learned which tactics were most effective in ensuring the media would portray the war in as favorable a light as possible, and through outright censorship, restricting journalists’ access to hot spots, and sterile “press releases” that manipulated the flow of information, the correspondent had few choices but to “get on board.”
The pursuit of truth was being subsumed by the desire to wage an effective war, and, in the end, the military won out—chief Pentagon public affairs spokesman during the Vietnam War Barry Zorthian declared at a National Press Club forum on March of 1991 that “the Gulf War is over, and the press has lost.” Capitalizing on its monopoly on information access, the military has now implemented a policy in which correspondents are rewarded for positive reporting and punished for publishing stories that somehow contradict the official policy line. Knightley takes the military’s opposition to rogue reporters to an even more extreme level, reporting the military in Iraq today is actually actively targeting independent journalists. One American correspondent described the attitude as “you can write what you like, but if we don’t like it we’ll shoot you.”

The role of the media in times of war is a highly contentious issue, and one that assumes new veracity with each subsequent war. Over time, however, the clash between the goals of the military and the goals of the media has been muted—suppressed either voluntarily or forcibly to create at least the appearance of cohesion between the press and the government. Depending on how the role and responsibility of the media is defined, the evolution of the relationship between the military and the media one of either greater alignment of mutual interests, or one that has come to be defined by the emergence of a dominant force in a necessarily conflictive relationship.