The role of media in undervaluing political dialogue: Syrian war as a case

Although the literature of contemporary capitalism theoretically abounds with calls for maintaining international peace and stability, in practice, its political representatives place wars among the many tools available for use to divide areas of political and economic influence when other political tools fail. This study aims to show the means used in the media to justify wars and armed conflicts by claiming that it is impossible to provide corresponding or alternative means, such as dialogue, for example, or the general social desire to maintain stability through political solutions. In this context, the Syrian case represents a typical case of the abovementioned circumstances. It is known that the Syrian crisis, which exploded for reasons mostly internal and local, coincided with an international situation witnessing a critical global balance between East and West, which led to the continuation of the war on Syrian territory with the political, logistical, and military sponsorship of dozens of countries in the world. These circumstances prompted the media, owned by local and international parties involved in the conflict, to justify the war as an inevitable evil. Therefore, it underestimated all calls and attempts to hold a political dialogue between the conflicting parties by presenting the dialogue as a form of military surrender, or as a solution that contradicts the possibility of retribution for the perpetrators of crimes, or by questioning the eligibility of the counterparty and its ability to hold its promises, or by cynical examining the possibility of success of this path as a result. Our research selects tow samples of television programs purposefully, within the framework of the qualitative method, to analyze their critical discourse and to test the hypotheses and questions on which the research is based.