The Media and War

The media and warfare aren't strange bedfellows by any means. In fact, they are quite harmonious and complementary in their relationship. The media is how you sell a war, and is often how you start one as well. 

With the profound effect the media has on collective consciousness and minds of the masses, if you want to initiate a nation down the path to war, the media is the primary platform to start a nation down that path. We have seen this time and again, from the press reports of the sinking of the battleship Maine that got us into the Spanish-American War to the coverage of September 11th and the media build up to the War in Iraq in 2003. 

The media is the marketplace of wars. It is how governments and ideological groups sell their cause to an audience and sell the war to the people. Once a war is initiated, the media makes a spectacle of the conflict, sending journalists and reporters to cover the action and carnage of combat.

     Even in their sense of nobility and their displays of compassion for the suffering of the victims of the horrors of war, the media still makes war into a spectacle, almost a sport in some cases, and sells their product to an audience driven by the enticing realism and rawness of actual conflict who readily and willingly consumes the violent information. 

     This selling of war and the spectacle media turns conflict into helps contribute to the cyclical, generational repetitiveness of conflict and prolongs the conflict cycle pretty much indefinitely as a result. War sells newspapers. War gets clicks on the internet. War keeps 24 hour news channels on people's television for 24 hours. War tells the best and most intriguing stories. 

    Because of the media's relationship with war, and the military-industrial complex president Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his administration, a complex that profits immensely off of war, death, and destruction, the cycle of generational warfare in the United States is all but guaranteed to continue on for the forseeable future. 

    Every generation or so, give or take, we will probably see a moderate scale war or proxy war with either a non-state actor like Al-Quaeda or a rogue state with an authoritarian regime. 

Because of how the media covers war, how the government sells war to the media, and how so many industries ranging from tech to machinery to (obviously) weapons and munitions industries profit so much off of conflict, the established participation in warfare is all but guaranteed not just for the duration of the United States' existence, but for the remainder of humanity's existence as well. 

Not to be too much of a cynic, but war will only end when the world does, and it will possibly (probably) be war itself that ends the world.