Students for War

Defence has re-emerged as a key issue in the news following a string of recent developments both in operations abroad and in the workings of government here in Britain.

For a country that once had one of the most powerful and largest militaries in the world, it is hard to believe that defence ever left the main political stage. But the end of the Cold War coupled with other public sector priorities, reduced defence spending in real terms and major conflicts becoming less frequent, made defence a less prominent issue.

This is changing now, driven by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraq War was controversial and divisive, but it also placed the Armed Forces in the mainstream spotlight for the first time in over a decade. For every discussion about when the troops should be withdrawn or when an inquiry should begin, there was also talk of armoured vehicles and strategies against the insurgency.

For news to be of any value, it needs to work inside a framework of defined factors. Satisfying these criteria gives the news piece credibility in the market. The salient features of any news piece must include the following: Timeliness, impact, proximity, prominence, conflict, bizarre, human interest, and currency. With new media breaking barriers in communication, another factor has crept into news there by adding another criterion to the existing ones- Sex.

The utility of News depends firstly on its immediacy. The information has to be hot off the shelf for it to carry value. Most information has a specific shelf life, but news thrives on the sole condition that it be recent. The value of time-specific events or information diminishes as more times lapses between when the thing happened and when the information was first disseminated.