The connections between war and media, forged over the course of a century, run long and deep. As we find in these pages, the history of war and its telling has been a battle over public perception. The selection of which stories are told and which are ignored helps justify past battles and insure future wars. Narratives of protest and pain, defeat and suffering, guilt and abuse struggle to be heard amid the empowering myths of war and heroism.

As Robin Andersen argues, the history of struggle between war and its representation has changed the way war is fought and the way we tell the stories of war. Information management, once called censorship and propaganda, has developed in tandem with new media technologies. Now digital imaging creates virtual battlefields as computer-based technologies transform the weapons of war. Along the way, images on the nightly news, on movie screens, and in videogames have turned war into entertainment. In the grip of virtual war, it is difficult to realize the loss of compassion or the consequences for democracy.