Media has increasingly evolved into a power and security form of social and political organization. It has become a matter of high politics as it frames and re-frames perceptions, ideas as well as, psychological and mental structures, along lines that touch upon the very heart of a society’s or a country’s national security. This renders media a potential weapon of war much in its own right.
This paper focuses on media and communicative framing within the context of strategy and strategic interaction as articulated by some major thinkers in both fields (e.g. Irving Goffman; Basil Liddell Hart). It will examine how informational virtual space, through a medium of strategic deception, constructs contextual frames or what may be called master frames, with the purpose of re-positioning an audience, through a process of conversion, in ways that elicit dynamics of fragmentary and oppositional social movements in the service of hegemonic geopolitical and security interests. In the process it will also attempt to shed light on the meaning and consequences of framing as a substantive form of political communication embedded in the indirect approach of war articulated by British strategist Basil Liddell Hart.