Post-cold-war US Policy For War-time News Control

As part of social control, news control can be used by a class to serve its own in ideological areas and performed as an effective means for centralized, unified management of the state regime both in war times and peaceful periods. Transformation of wars has brought about the integration of public opinions and real wars and led to qualitative changes of the war-time public opinions strategy and, consequently, war-time news control has now inevitably become an indispensable topic of journalism and communication research. A belligerent state in all previous modern wars, the US, whose war-time control model has not only embodied the strategies, policies and means western governments employed to manipulate war propaganda, but has also been enhanced with new ways in continuous war experiences, should be the focal point in this paper.It is the First time to differentiate historical stages of news control by demarcation of Cold War Period in this paper. Although research scope is mainly based on a brand-new historical background, analysis of theoretical origins and realistic foundations of news control has been made at a comprehensive and deep-going level by tracing back western political theories and comparing Pre/Post-Cold-War international situations. Through this comparison and case studies of several US Post-Cold wars, a viewpoint has been made that dominant ideas of US policy for war-time news control are actual media expressions of classical Elitism. In addition, preliminary analysis of new problems facing US war-time news control in Post-Cold-War era, exemplified discussion about basic US model of war-time news control and summary of characteristics of US war-time news control have been made in the following sections.China has been undergoing a relatively long peaceful period, but prohibition of combat readiness will never be her ever-peace-keeping strategy whereas international situation has been constantly changing. The ultimate goal of this paper is that the above-mentioned research on war-time news control will serve as some references to China's news control policy and arouse new thinkings of future war-time news control.