Abstract
To many journalism students, Edward R. Murrow’s universally recognized voice—“this . . . is London”—can always remind us of the heyday of American “foreign correspondence” shining in crucial moments of world events. For many scholars of international communication, the UNESCO debate on foreign news flow and New World Information Order in the 1980s still looms large in memory. Nostalgia may dispose one to lament the diminishing role played by foreign correspondents within international relations in the digital era.
The decline of international newsgathering by professionals over the past fifteen years, in particular for newspapers, is disheartening. According to American Journalism Review (AJR), the number of foreign correspondents employed by U.S. newspapers has markedly decreased since AJR’s first census in 1998. AJR identified 307 full-time foreign correspondents and pending assignments in 2003, which decreased to 234 in 2011. As for broadcasting, networks’ airtime for foreign news has been in free fall over the years, with only the exception of National Public Radio. 1 The industry has been so pessimistic about foreign correspondence that few find phrases like “demise of the foreign correspondent” 2 and “death of the American foreign correspondent” 3 exaggerating.
While scholars and professionals continue debating the role of foreign correspondence in news production and broadly, in international affairs, the handover of ownership of one of the most prestigious newspapers known for its coverage of international news and foreign affairs and policies—The Washington Post—may evoke more thoughts on the future of foreign correspondence and the importance of international news in international relations, if it is not yet an “end of an era.”
Against this backdrop, Dell’orto Giovanna’s newly published book provides a unique and timely investigation of the evolving role of journalism in international relations. Emphasizing “what discourses in news media tell us about sociocultural meanings about the rest of the world” (p. 26), this book aims to unravel the complicated interplay between news media and foreign affairs.
Taking a constructivist perspective on international relations, communication, and journalism, this book features a careful discourse analysis of more than 2,000 news articles covering twenty crucial global events over 150 years to answer such central questions as, “What foreign news has been covered and what discourses of the world have emerged in the American press?” “How do th[e] images [of foreign countries and the world] compare with U.S. foreign policies contemporary to them?” And how does the understanding of the world “shape both media coverage and actual policies?” (p. 26).
The extensive historical research conducted in this book convincingly supports the author’s core argument that the press has always been indispensable in international affairs; it offers a public arena where the American audience and politicians can make sense of foreign nations, the world as well as the United States’s global role. The perceived foreign or international realities shaped by news media consequently “serve as the basis for policy and action” (p. 1).
Four chapters are chronologically organized to report the findings of discourse analysis covering four defining periods of time, from 1848 to 2008, guided by the aforementioned essential research questions. Specifically, Chapter 2 focuses on five consequential events that took place in foreign countries between 1848 and 1900. Media discourses, as the author pinpoints, “parallel Washington’s growing involvement in world affairs . . . and the establishment of the United States as a global power” (p. 35). Chapter 3 emphasizes five major international events from 1910 through 1937 when the United States took the global central stage. This era, as the author states, was the “golden age” for foreign correspondents, as well as “a period marked by an unusually close collaboration between Washington and the press” (p. 68). Chapter 4 covers five events that shaped the Cold War era, 1946 through 1991, a period featuring not only an “overwhelming” but also “fragile” global presence of the press in the “American Century” (p. 110). Chapter 5 selects five more events that partially reshaped the first two decades of the post-Cold War era from 1992 up to 2008, in the backdrop of the United States’s changing interests in the world as well as the ascent of new media.
Following the discourse analyses, the next chapter discusses today’s foreign correspondence. Combining in-depth interviews with leading journalists at home and abroad, the author evaluates the challenges facing foreign news in the U.S. media and the future of professional foreign correspondence. Incorporating insiders’ perspectives, the author goes back to the central argument of this book and maintains, “foreign correspondence is a fundamental locus of constructions about foreign countries and the United States itself, which has always helped shape the environment within which certain foreign policies were made and others excluded” (p. 205).
In the concluding chapter, the author revisits her concerns about the discursive role of media in international relations, that is, evolved media discourses of the world, evolved foreign policy affected by or engaged in interplay with media discourses, and the correlation between foreign correspondence and international affairs. She wraps up this book by calling on the American press to continue assuming its vital role in international affairs as the “idea mediators” who can provide “substantive” and “more complete” stories to serve the interest of the global public.
Shedding light on the relationship between mass media, international communication, and international relations through a careful discourse analysis from a longitudinal perspective, this book will absolutely make a worthy reading for scholars and students who are interested in not only the foreign correspondence and the impact of media on foreign policy making but also a variety of related subjects, such as international news, media history, journalistic practices in history, print journalism, and public opinion.
This book is also an outstanding addition to the collection of a series of classic books or studies in this field, such as Bernard Cohen’s The Press and Foreign Policy, Stephen Hess’s International News and Foreign Correspondents, and John Hamilton’s Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting, to name a few.
Meanwhile, this book offers excellent methodological examples for discourse analysis. The author explains the goal, scope, and steps of conducting discourse analysis “over a broad period of time” (p. 28). The author believes discourse analysis to be one of the best methods to critically examine the mediated foreign realities constructed by American Press, as well as their link with foreign policy trends (p. 31). With theoretical significance and methodological rigor combined, this book serves as an ideal option for courses or topical seminars at undergraduate and graduate levels.
Returning to the beginning of this review, Dell’orto’s book may particularly interest those who attempt to “wax nostalgic about some largely mythical great correspondents” (p. 32), or on the contrary, skeptical of the necessity of foreign correspondence in newsgathering and its significance in international affairs. After presenting us with the “history of American journalism’s engagement with world affairs” (p. 3), the author reminds us of the danger in assuming that foreign correspondents can be substituted by non-professionals and foreign policy decisions can be wisely made outside of “the ecologies of discourse that emerge through, and are reflected by, news media content” (pp. 32–33). In this sense, this text provides journalism historians and international relations scholars with a “launching pad” for further discussions on the role of American press in world affairs and the future of American foreign correspondence “amid a revolutionized communication and policy environment” (p. 3).