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Abstract
The analysis of The New York Times's coverage of US national security identifies that the end of the Cold War has significant consequences for how the elite newspaper has delivered the stories about US national security. Most importantly, the amount of coverage about US national security has dropped half after the end of the Cold War both in the front page and editorial page. The military issues are still dominantly portrayed as political discourse throughout the media coverage in terms of “national security” concerns. Even though Russia no longer plays a security threat to the United States as the former Soviet Union did during the Cold War, many other regions and countries have been referred as new US security concerns in the post Cold War era. Disagreeing with common wisdom, the priority given to US interventionist policy over isolationist policy has not decreased even after the end of the Cold War. The analysis of The New York Times's articles also shows that subjects of security, such as economic security or environmental security, have become salient in the coverage since the end of the Cold War, though the occurrences of those articles are not very significant yet.
Within the culture of the Cold War, the use of the word “social” with “security” emerges along with the increased role of the state in providing certain types of services. In the post-World War II world, this is followed by the language of national security, defining an explicitly protective relationship between a state and its citizens. Therefore, conventionally formulated security is about the protection of some form of political community, with community understood as a population with attributes in common. The Cold War highlighted certain events as international problems, identified sources, offered normative judgments, and recommended particular policies. With the disappearance of Cold War framing, the cultural prism for issues on national security has been changed, and consequently, its media coverage has also changed. In the post-Cold War era the security is affected in numerous ways: not only by military issues, but also economic welfare, environmental concerns, cultural identity, and political rights.
