The elite media and the military-civilian culture gap

Even though some thoughtful studies exist on relations between the media an d the military, most of them focus on the conflict over information securit y and control during wars, military operations, and entanglements abroad. W hat is missing is a detailed empirical study of whether the civilian and mi litary media convey distinctive perspectives of and opinions about the mili tary's attitudes and actions. Our purpose is to compare and contrast the de pictions of military culture and any gaps with civilian culture by content- analyzing three civilian and three military newspapers over the last six mo nths of 1998. Overall, we find that both the civilian and the military news papers are less monolithic and more diverse than we expected. Actually, eac h newspaper provides distinctive perspectives on and attitudes toward the m ilitary, which do not necessarily contribute to a civilian-military culture gap.