Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. John Maxwell Hamilton. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 680 pp. $45 hbk.
This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence. Full of bright word paintings, Journalism’s Roving Eye touches on almost all big- and small-picture issues, and provides a pithy review of U.S. journalism history from colonial times to the present. Since, as author John Maxwell Hamilton argues in the last chapter, virtually all mass communication today has an international component, the book is a most welcome addition to complementary reading lists in journalism history undergraduate classes and could interest graduate students despite its lack of a theoretical framework.
An investigation into how American journalism has covered the world could not come at a better time, as budget cuts, a tendency toward infotainment and the overhaul of “old media” business models precipitously shrink the quantity of substantial U.S. foreign correspondence. As Hamilton writes, “[A]ll the problems of journalism are magnified in foreign news-gathering”—expensive, difficult to edit, hard to obtain, and tough to sell to a largely uninterested audience. And yet, he argues, “[T]he stakes in journalism are nowhere higher.” The roving eye of professional journalists has perhaps never been more needed than in today’s interdependent, intimately connected world.
The vast merit of Hamilton’s book is to take that critical argument beyond the usual twenty-first-century hand-wringing over new technologies, and to try showing how foreign news has been an integral part of American journalism from its inception. Hamilton, dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and the author of several books on international news and individual journalists, brings a wealth of professional experience to this inquiry, since his career included reporting from abroad for U.S. print and radio media as well as political appointments in foreign affairs.
In an academic field and profession single-mindedly focused upon discussion of the future, Hamilton cannot be praised enough for amassing a stunning wealth of detail to remind us that change cannot be studied outside of the large laboratory of history, and that lessons from the past are integral to planning for what will be next. The book has one weakness—it focuses almost exclusively on the “cavalcade of characters,” in the author’s words, that populates the annals of journalism, providing a collection of powerful, colorful vignettes of distinguished and notorious writers whose exploits tend to steal attention away from the larger crucial problem—the uneven supply of news about the world to the world’s largest power.
Most chapters tell the story of epochs in foreign correspondence through an individual or organization that embodies their extreme characteristics. The narrative is mostly chronological: Starting with the efforts of colonial printers in securing news from Europe, it follows the penny press revolution in newsgathering in the mid-nineteenth century; the permanent establishment of foreign bureaus after the Civil War; the consequential antics of yellow journalism at the end of the century; the rise of propaganda and manipulation at the dawn of the new one; the “golden age for foreign correspondence” between the two World Wars; the rise of broadcast as the Cold War emerged, and the struggles over Vietnam, where Hamilton’s story, somewhat surprisingly, ends.
Aside from the final two chapters, the last four decades are discussed only in passing at the end of a chapter where some relevant issue—be it human rights reporting or journalists as de facto diplomats—is raised, so that newspaper insistence on the Cuban plight before the Spanish-American War leads, jarringly, to a discussion of reporting on atrocities in Darfur, and the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service coverage of the 1920s League of Nations diplomatic deliberations is followed by Thomas Friedman’s 2002 proposal for peace in the Middle East.
Throughout the chapters, Hamilton includes myriad quirky details that encapsulate the spirit of the times—John Campbell of the Boston News-Letter proudly telling his 1719 readers that, “Now we are less than five months behind” in printing foreign news; David Halberstam cabling that if his editors kept questioning his Vietnam reports, “I will resign repeat resign and I mean it repeat mean it”; NBC’s Talbot Bowen in 1939 screaming into a phone, “Hello, New York! Hello, New York! Gimme the air, gimme the air!” as he witnessed the explosion sinking a German warship in Uruguay. The chapter that includes Bowen’s quote and narrates the rise of broadcast reporting speaks to the strengths of this book: merging historical, political, technological factors, and spotlighting largely forgotten correspondents to vividly portray moments with lasting repercussions.
Other less successful chapters minutely detail adventures of a handful of characters, such as James Vincent Sheean, author and sometime correspondent for the New York Tribune in the 1920s, who believed in UFOs and apologized to authorities for flooding after performing a rain dance. Focusing on a few outsized figures is in line with the tradition of historical writings about “great foreign correspondents.” But the vast disparity of Hamilton’s chosen representatives suggests that he is perhaps too inclusive in his definition of foreign correspondent—from anyone (preferably dashing) who wrote anything (preferably spectacular) for mass media from abroad, to the plodding, anonymous professional reporter for large organizations who is expected to be everywhere and whom nobody remembers.
Two conflicting historical interpretations and, consequently, two options for the future emerge from Hamilton’s exposition: foreign newsgathering as a laborious, underestimated public service, in the tradition of media powerhouses that have sustained its daily grind, or foreign correspondence as a formerly exclusive, exotic club that today can be gate-crashed by anyone who “can flip open a laptop and begin to blog.”
“Everyone can be a foreign correspondent,” Hamilton argues in the last chapter. His masterful narrative would lead to that conclusion, for it illustrates how throughout history a disparate collection of individuals has written media reports from abroad, often courageously, outrageously, and with powerful consequences for America’s view of the world. But whether everyone was a professional foreign correspondent capable of routinely performing a great public service—and whether anyone will manage to be one in the future—remains, unfortunately, another story.
GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
University of Minnesota