ABSTRACT
War has been a central fact of social life at least since the agricultural revolution, some ten thousand years ago, deeply involved in many of the most important changes in technology, culture and social and political organization. But the study of war has for the most part remained outside the mainstream of social investigation (Shaw, 1991; Giddens, 1985). In media studies a similar tale can be told. Despite the fact that empirical media research originated to a significant extent in response to the mobilization of communication for war during the First World War (Lippmann and Merz, 1920; Lasswell, 1927), the literature was until recently very thin both in volume and in intellectual scope.
