Rethinking Media Coverage

Since the 9/11 attacks, media and security are increasingly intertwined as the media technologies of filtering, sorting and keywording have become essential elements of national defense. In this book, Lisa Parks explores the complex relations between media and security and uses the term "coverage" to develop a conceptual framework for understanding them.

A major goal of this book is to critique the popular idea of coverage as simply a neutral practice of objectively reporting an event by the news media. Instead, Parks argues, media coverage actively involves the power to shape not only how citizens think and act, but also how they imagine global space and power relations in the aftermath of 9/11.

At the heart of this booka (TM)s argument is the way that seemingly benign media technologies such as Powerpoint, YouTube, and Google Eartha "particularly these supporting technologies that are often behind the scenes of larger media systems such as television newsa "have been used to extend the security regime into the spaces of everyday life. Each chapter explores a different media through the lens of a post-9/11 security culture. The first chapter, for example, looks at the ways that television airwaves came to be regarded as public property in the US, and then how the airwaves became a space to be defendeda "for example, by bombing campaigns against Arab satellite television stations after 9/11.

This book is a major contribution to media studies that offers a bold, new understanding of how media technologies shape our perceptions of global space and power relations.