From Pigeons to News Portals: Foreign Reporting and the Challenge of New Technology (review)

Globalization has moved at a rapid pace over the last two decades. National boundaries that seemed important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are now easily penetrated by trade goods, tourists, immigrants, capital, and, most important for this study, information. Journalists bear a heavy burden in this new world, and it is their work that is the focus of these nine scholarly essays edited by David D. Perlmutter and John Maxwell Hamilton. The unprecedented volume and velocity of messages through the internet and of televised news coverage, as well as the pervasiveness of high-speed jet airliners, have changed the environment in which reporters and editors work.

Eight of the nine contributions concentrate on fairly specific topics. For example, Lucila Vargas and Lisa Paulin point out that, for many residents of the United States, news from Mexico or China may not be foreign reporting but news from home. Margaret Defleur concludes that the global influence of U.S.-produced mass media has created a new phenomenon: negative cultural response among young people in reaction to images of violence, materialism, and promiscuity. One overriding question emerges in six of the essays: Is the impact of the new technology beneficial for journalists and their news-consuming public, or do these high-speed operations contribute to misperceptions and mistaken judgments? Obviously there is no simple answer, and here we get nuanced, thought-provoking commentary. Kaye Sweetser Trammell and coeditor David Perlmutter find that international bloggers have added to the resource base on the internet, and John Yemma sees improvements in editor-reporter communications resulting in better journalism. Emily Erickson and coeditor John Maxwell Hamilton defend “parachute journalism”—the rapid deployment of correspondents by airplane for short assignments in distant lands as contrasted to independent reporters of the Richard Harding Davis type. Erickson and Hamilton claim that this approach can bring more expertise to a crisis and enhance the connections between journalists and readers back home.

The other side of this issue is well represented in the essay on “The Nokia Effect.” Steven Livingston argues that emphasis on episodic coverage of a fast-breaking crisis stresses the visual and the visceral at the expense of understanding long-term trends and contextual information. The excitement of immediacy often outweighs efforts at rational, detailed explanations, leaving the public and policymakers misinformed. Philip Seib identifies a similar problem in the growing reliance on “real-time” coverage since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Often dubbed the CNN Effect, this type of coverage is no longer limited to that one cable channel or to the United States. Al Jazeera and other non-Western news agencies now provide millions of viewers with the same compelling images, which carry a heavy emotional as opposed to dispassionate content.

The reporting of global news often has its greatest ramifications in the field of diplomacy. In spite of recent fascination with the internationalization of business, diplomats and other government officials, rather than corporate executives, are usually charged with the responsibility of responding to international crises. Richard Moose offers a thoughtful discussion on the substantial increase in such crises since the 1960s. During the Vietnam era, the U.S. State Department would have perhaps six hours of lead time to come to grips with a new situation, but in the early years of the twenty-first century that temporal cushion has almost disappeared. Moose observes that policymakers must constantly monitor television news and the internet because the old diplomatic channels move too slowly.

Along these same lines, in Under the Wire (2003), David Paull Nickles presents an excellent study of the impact of telegraphic communication on diplomacy from the late nineteenth century through World War I. Nickles’s analysis suggests comparisons with the most recent revolution in communications not only in the field of foreign policy but also in journalism. The acceleration of what Nickles terms “diplomatic time” placed pressure...