International News and Foreign Correspondents

Front Cover
Brookings Institution Press, 1996 - 209 pages
Today, American public opinion is having more influence than ever on how U.S. leaders respond to international crises and formulate foreign policy. Yet at the same time, there is evidence that Americans are increasingly ill-informed of international affairs. This paradox raises many serious questions: What information about the world are we given by the mainstream media? How much? How good? By whom? Through what means? And how much foreign news is really enough? In this fifth volume of his highly acclaimed Newswork series, Stephen Hess addresses these questions and offers a revealing look at how the print and broadcast media cover international affairs and how foreign correspondents do their work. Hess contends that the United States is a nation of two media societies. One is awash in specialized information, available to those who have the time, interest, money, and education to take advantage of it. The other encompasses the vast majority of Americans, who rely on the top stories of TV networks' evening news programs and their community's daily newspaper. For them, Hess says, the current diet of international news offered is not adequate considering its potential importance to their lives. When the world imposes itself on the U.S. media, it does so in a big way--the Gulf War, the coup in Moscow, the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there are remarkable peaks and valleys in international news coverage. According to Hess, TV in particular shrinks the globe geographically--with Asia underrepresented and the Middle East overrepresented, for example. And much of TV's focus on international violence is gratuitous, telling us where and how, but very rarely why. Hess concludes with suggestionsfor improving international coverage.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

International News How Much Is Not Enough?
6
Who Are the Foreign Correspondents?
11
What Gets Covered and Where
28
The Culture of Foreign Correspondence
47
The Technology of International News
60
Freelancers and Foreigners
68
Languages
79
Constructive Criticism
87
Leaving
107
Tables
115
Survey of Foreign Correspondents
159
Who Is the Best Foreign Correspondent You Have Known?
165
Questionnaire Respondents
169
Notes
177
Index
199
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 2 - I was one of those two or three that was strongly recommending he do it, and it was very much because of the television pictures of these starving kids...

Bibliographic information