Seminar War and conflict news coverage

Different actors are involved in the process of conflict news production: various interest groups try to influence the news coverage to gain public support. Journalists are exposed to this strategic communication, because they largely depend on external sources, since they often do not have direct access to the battleground. This tendency is also rooted in the news crisis with many media companies having less resources for foreign correspondents. Nevertheless, journalists are not victims of strategic communication, they also follow their own interests and their newspaper editorial lines. The audience mainly depends on the media’s news coverage, because they do not experience war directly. Since the introduction of platforms like Twitter, the media’s dominant role as image creator for the public discourse might have either decreased due to the higher availability of information or increased since the high volume of data needs to be interpreted and evaluated professionally. Thus, conflict news production takes place in a tense dynamic environment of actors who depend on each other, but who also follow differing interests. It is consequently a thrilling and vivid subfield of communication research. The seminar analyzes the different roles actors hold in the process of news production in a conflict environment and introduces different research paradigms for the analysis of war and conflict news coverage. Therefore, it will build upon literature that derives from a variety of approaches and concepts. INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: If you want to participate in this class, please contact our international coordinator (betreuung.erasmus@ifkw.lmu.de) before September 10th 2014! Due to limited capacities we will not be able to accept all applicants to this class. Department Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung LMU München WiSe 1415 Jungblut Marc