Media

Media are the means through which communication takes place. They both communicate and enact international relations and have been a perennial scholarly and non-scholarly concern worldwide, constantly in conversation with a changing global media context. Media perform various functions, which often overlap. As well as reporting particular stories, they can shape the way in which people understand and respond to such stories. They can transmit cultural norms, values and identities that support or undermine the political systems that they operate within. They may perform an entertainment role, though empirically, this is often intimately interrelated with political and social concerns. The precise functions and working of media vary depending on the type of system in which they are operating, with much scholarship seeking to typologise media systems across place, time or mode of political organisation. Media's impacts similarly vary – in terms of perceptions versus concrete outcomes; in relation to a political actor's proximity to power; and across media systems.