The 21st Century has seen some major developments in its political discourse and the core and main reason for this is the media.

According to Shilpa Davé, “The word “media” is fundamentally about the power and control over the dissemination of information in mass culture.” (Davé, 2015, p. 149).

Media is not just news but, in fact, it is everything which the whole world sees through photos and videos via a platform, for example, social media or gaming consoles.

Over the past years, the world has seen the media playing an important role in almost every political decision of a democratic country, whether it is policymaking, war or militarism.

Even in the US Army recruitment process, “To pass the course, the ‘student’ must ‘accept’ the idea that the media has been and will be a player on the battlefield and that leaders must plan for and react to the actions of the reporters.” (Woodger, n.d., p. 81) Militarism actually “is an ideology that sees society, politics, and culture as ultimately defined by war and allots the highest value to those activities that either prepare for or facilitate the waging of war.” (Avilés- Santiago, 2017, p. 136).

The military or war related decision making is widely claimed by many authors that those decisions are greatly under the influence of the media. This statement that whether ‘media and popular culture plays a central role’ in understanding war and militarism is agreed by many authors, such as Teresa Joseph, who confirmed that the most crucial aspect of media making war and militarism understandable is the way various governments want their people to understand it or as some authors term it as “selective reporting”.

The main author that contributes to this part is Teresa Joseph, who says that, “This selection of news is often based on the interests of the home country.

Conflicts and suffering within the Third World often go unreported by the international media unless the West has its own interests in the region.” (Joseph, 2014, p. 230).

Many authors, when agreeing with the given statement, mostly argue the influence of media on war through the images that were produced from that event. Those images weren’t just images but were rather a tool for propaganda and political purposes and, “Since the late nineteenth century the rise of mass press, propaganda, and censorship pertaining to the war theatre has been on the increase.” (Abid, 2017, p. 452).

Mujib Abid provided Jihad as a modern example which is currently on the hit list of media and popular culture propaganda.

Another case of understanding war is the way media portrays war, as if they were advertising the people about war, in an appealing manner and people become major supporters of militarism and they believe that war is the only solution to a situation.

The growth of media shifted the mindsets of the general population understanding war and militarism from a realist perspective of ‘paranoid patriotism’ to a more liberalist perspective of ‘humanitarian debates’.

During the times of the War on Terror or any conflict before that, for example, the Falkland islands (war between Britain and Argentina), the reporting of the events were selected in order to ‘legitimise’ war ( Joseph, 2014, p. 229) because the media spectrum was limited and not everyone around the world were aware of the actual event.

It attempts to de-escalate conflicts by highlighting peace and conflict resolution as much as violence.” ( Joseph, 2014, p. 237).

However, John Galtung disagrees with this ‘peace journalism’ as he believes, “that there does not exist a tradition of “peace journalism” for covering peace like other practices that receive specialized coverage by specially trained journalists.” (Abid, 2017, p. 451) And, that the reporting of Jake Lynch was, “some kind of plot to bamboozle the public into supporting wars.” (Abid, 2017, p. 451).

(The writer is a student of International Relations and currently the President of Pakistani Society at Cardiff University)