My media and military experiences are unique to both industries and I believe I have a big role to help bridge the existing divide. Both institutions are very critical for the existence and sustenance of democracy. The state has the absolute monopoly to the use of force through the military and the police and it is the media that informs the public about the goings on inside the state machinery called government. Whenever I write I always have to make an empirical distinction between the state and government because the two are not the same as we are often made to believe.
The media–military relations are often characterised by a clash of ideas and traditions. S.F Crozier writes; “There can be few professions more ready to misunderstand each other than journalists and soldiers.” This misunderstanding originates from the thought that news organisations are always motivated by profits in the manner they report while the military always claims to be motivated by service to country in keeping everything in their path secret.
