While media critics maintain that war coverage has a strong bias toward promoting conflict escalation, their opponents claim that the concept of distorted reality cannot be upheld. What seems to be a media-political dispute results from an epistemological issue that tangles the very roots of cultural studies in general: the question of whether the social construction of reality implies the arbitrariness of opinions.
The present paper discusses this proposition from a constructivist point of view and shows that it is based on an inadequate and logically incorrect understanding of truth and reality, and on a lack of differentiation between facts and meanings, between truth and beliefs and between objective and subjective realities.
Defining a third path between cultural imperialism and a naïve understanding of cultural relativism, the paper finally discusses the methodological basis on which media criticism can build.