International Media Communication in a Global Age. Guy J. Golan, Thomas J. Johnson, and Wayne Wanta, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 480 pp.
Negotiating in the Press: American Journalism and Diplomacy, 1918-1919. Joseph R. Hayden. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. 320 pp.
These texts present two opposite but equally important foci of research in the growing field of international communication—the edited collection takes a macro view, tackling news flow theories, international journalism, and strategic communication in a globalized world, while the monograph delves in depth on a very narrow episode, the peace negotiations after World War I. Both introduce fruitful research avenues about concerns as different as the role of the news media in diplomacy and strategies for global branding. While two of the three parts of Golan, Johnson, and Wanta’s volume are valuable enough that the book could be used as textbook in an introductory class on international communication, Hayden’s work is most helpful as a spur to further research on the important issues it raises.
The premise of both works is that the media (in all forms and at all stages of production to reception) have mattered greatly in international affairs, and, at their best, both introduce novel ideas for exploring the multidimensionality of international communication beyond the established models focused on uneven flow and quality of news, and press-policy influences.
Golan, Johnson, and Wanta want to focus on how globalization has “redefined international communication in several ways,” including by opening new markets to media corporations and by riding the wave of new digital technologies. The three editors, all teaching in communication and/or journalism at American universities, have grouped the twenty-two chapters by a variety of authors (whose affiliations are omitted) in three parts, focusing respectively on theories about the system of international news, the framing of international journalism, and public relations and advertising global strategies.
The volume reads like a collection of research papers, so the overall organization suffers from both repetition and the lack of a clear principle, though a common thread is the nearly exclusive emphasis on quantitative research methods and the many explanatory tables and graphs. Another commonality, of course, is the international dimension, defined either as a non-U.S. focus (such as a PR crisis in South Korea in chapter 17) or as comparative studies (such as coverage of the Iraq war in U.S., British, French, and Arab media in chapter 10).
Part I is the weakest section of the book, despite a standout first chapter by international news flow authority Tsan-Kuo Chang. Chang argues that one of the dominant paradigms in international communication research, cultural imperialism, is a competing framework to globalization, which offers a compelling analytical tool, even though Chang rightly cautions that it should not be equated with the end of the importance of nation-states. Most of the other chapters in this section focus, broadly, on what makes events international news: “Determinants of International News Coverage,” per the title of one of them.
Strangely for a volume focused on the changes globalization and digital technologies have brought to international communication, none of these chapters uses primary data more recent than 2000, a gap of fully ten years in which both the media landscape and international relations have changed drastically. Even allowing for the slow processes of book production, the lack of evidence from the twenty-first century hurts the authors’ main argument, namely that classic hierarchies based on “the nations’ location in the world system,” as Wanta and Golan put it in chapter 5, still determine what countries make the news and when.
Most of the findings replicate staples of traditional research — “U.S. involvement and threat of event to the United States” make coverage likely in American media, as discussed in chapter 3, and world-system factors like population and military expenditures also influence news coverage, per chapter 6. Golan, the author of chapter 6, which is based on 1999 U.S. television news, concludes by arguing that, “The importance of relevance as a news value should be further examined by future research as shifts in the global political paradigm as represented by the U.S. war on terror may in itself impact the very notion of what makes a nation relevant.” Why a book published in 2010 does not contain precisely that research is hard to fathom.
Parts II and III, however, present fresher, more interesting findings and case studies. Most chapters in Part II focus on the challenges of gathering quality foreign news and the consequent oversimplification of it (chapter 7), and how public crises and wars are framed differently according to different cultural values (chapters 9-11). Such findings are hardly surprising or methodologically groundbreaking—did anyone really think Le Monde framed the Iraq War as The New York Times did? But they do introduce readers to important concepts without being inherently obsolete. The last two chapters in this section, researching international news in Australia’s online media and a Chinese blog, explicitly investigate changes in the post-9/11, Internet-heavy world. They find that the number of a country’s Internet users is a determinant of news flow (chapter 13), and that blogs can “operate in their ascribed democratizing tendency” even in authoritarian regimes (chapter 14).
All studies in Part III share the premise of chapter 15—that strategic communication has become international by default because of “the internationalization of business and world communication systems.” Geared for scholars but useful to practitioners, the research ranges from multinational corporations’ public relations, in the same chapter, to the role of campaigns for national identity building (chapter 19), but almost all studies share a common theme — that the new strategic communication environment carries the double-challenge of global diffusion and local interpretation. The most vivid case studies detail how an entertainment company dealt with the fallout from its release of nude photos of a famous actress posing as a Korean comfort woman (chapter 17); how the federation of Colombia’s coffee growers modernized the internationally successful symbol of Juan Valdez (chapter 19); and how dependency on mobile phones is affecting social values among teens in the United States and Taiwan (chapter 20). All three illustrate the new realities of cultural conflict and definition in a global era dominated by instant visibility and responsiveness on the Web.
This, then, addresses the central premise of the book. No individual chapter does so for Hayden’s book, whose fundamental argument is that “journalists helped to ‘make’ the peace in 1918-1919 almost as much as statesmen did,” because both they and the diplomats involved in the complex negotiations after World War I shared the progressive faith in “information and expertise, in the ‘authority of facts.’”
The question of journalism’s involvement in foreign affairs, and peace processes in particular, is urgently relevant. Unfortunately, Hayden, who teaches journalism at the University of Memphis, never shows evidence of how journalists were a part of peace negotiations beyond anecdotal evidence of reporters’ lives and networking in gay Paree (e.g., chapters 6, 8, and 11) and the diplomats’ new attention to the importance of swaying public opinion. In fact, the book hardly differentiates between journalism and what it calls “publicity” — did journalists make a difference in the negotiations only because they provided the publicity that government and opposition leaders craved?
Conclusions like the following seem to imply it: “[D]iplomacy had become more open in part because of propaganda, and this is an important aspect missing from most accounts of the era.” What is missing from Hayden’s account is discussion of the truly nefarious threats to freedom of the press and freedom of expression embodied by the Espionage and Sedition acts in the late 1910s (which get about two pages) or, astonishingly, any historical context at all. The reader is assumed to know all about the governments involved in the treaty and their foreign policy aims, Wilson’s global vision—or World War I. The lone, inexcusably glib reference to one of the largest conflicts in history, one estimated to have killed 15 million people, is in this sentence: “No less significant than the trench skirmishes [emphasis added] in France, therefore, were the public opinion battles waged around the world.”
While Hayden’s research question is valid and more historical monographs should be written about the role of the media in international affairs, this book has too many structural weaknesses to be recommended. On the contrary, Golan, Johnson, and Wanta’s book makes a good introduction for undergraduates — especially if the editors update the first section.
GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
University of Minnesota