Evaluating different models of media behavior during armed conflicts: is the media in charge of the narrative?

This paper deals with the different models that examine the relationship between political actors and the media during conflicts, taking into account that the contributions of top researchers indicate that the effects of political communication on the audiences are very different for episodes of foreign policy. Current academic perspective show several models that have been proposed to explain these relationships: Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky, Heman), Indexing (Bennett, Paletz), the so-called CNN Effect, the Cascade Model (Entman) and other ad-hoc models. This research attempts to demonstrate the validity of each of them applied to two episodes of the Spanish foreign policy: the Kosovo war in 1999 and the 2003 Iraq war. To this end, researchers have investigated the use of frames by the press and the political discourse over the whole duration of each conflict to try to find similarities and changes in speeches. The results show that some models better describe the observed behavior, and that one of the main variables could be the degree of political agreement on the armed conflict as some models predict.