Media Wars in Gandhian Perspective.

What Mahatma Gandhi once called the ‘enthronement of violence as if it were a natural law’ would aptly describe the media's coverage of war in particular, and violence in general. If there is one overarching theme in media discourses about violence, it is that nature, including human nature, is presumed to be innately violent. In the case of the post-9/11 media, this tendency has of course acquired particular shades of inflexion, for instance, in the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. The general theme in media coverage of war seems to be that the present conflict comes from cultural differences, and conflict in general comes from our violent nature as human beings. This insidious tendency must be taken seriously by scholars of media, peace, and social justice because as the mighty global media system repeatedly spreads the notion that war and violence are somehow inevitable, normal, or natural, it ends up making alternatives to such a notion appear not only marginal, but actually unsustainable. But this is not so, and in my short discussion of Gandhian philosophy in this essay, I will argue that scholars of media and media wars must understand and apply the philosophy of nonviolence more accurately. To begin with, I am approaching nonviolence (or ahimsa) as a philosophy—one that is especially well developed in Gandhian thought and that we should consider seriously in the light of media coverage of wars, and not merely as a technique for activism as it is sometimes misunderstood to be. Non-violence, in other words, is an epistemology, and one that has great relevance for media and social sciences in general at a time when violence is increasingly normalized not only in the media, but perhaps in parts of the academy as well, to the extent that even critical theories of media and society fail to adequately address the question of violence and cruelty in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]