Through Their Eyes: Foreign Correspondents in the United States

Foreword

Steve Hess’s work on the interaction between the press and the government is a signature Brookings product. As a former reporter myself and a long-time admirer of Steve’s work, I’m proud to be associated with this, the sixth volume in the Newswork series, which began in 1981 with the publication of The Washington Reporters. My predecessor Bruce MacLaury began his foreword to that volume with these words: “In the vast literature about how Americans govern themselves, the role of the press is often neglected. Yet the press—no less than the presidency, the judiciary, and the legislature—is a public policy institution and deserves a place in explanations of the governmental process.” It’s hard to imagine that statement being made today, given what a cottage industry press watching has become, including in think tanks like this one. Yet Bruce was accurately reflecting the degree to which the media were then at the margins of social science scholarship. Indeed, Steve first had to invent new research tools to understand the press. Realizing, for instance, that many reporters are ill at ease with abstractions, he surveyed them by devising a daily log or diary that required precise information on each story: Events attended? Documents used? Types of people interviewed? On or off the record? In this way he showed how information, even of a presidential cast, is often channeled through Capitol Hill before it reaches the public. When studying Congress in two of his books, he took such unorthodox approaches as charting every TV camera at Senate hearForeword ix ings for a year, thereby illustrating the media’s priorities; exploring the politics of the Congressional Press Galleries; comparing the salaries of press secretaries to those of other staffers and then comparing their place in their office hierarchy to what they said their place was. When interviewing senators, he asked, “The press will put an adjective in front of your name; if you had your druthers, what adjective would you choose?” (“Hard-working” was their favorite.) He then counted adjectives in the leading newspapers. In one study, entitled “I Am on TV, Therefore I Am,” he added up how often House members appeared on the television news in their district and discovered, despite what they thought, that it was not very often. One of the joys of reading Steve is that he knows how to be serious without being dull. For a book on government press offices he spent a year inside the White House, the State Department, the Department of Transportation , and the Food and Drug Administration, watching press officers fight their bureaucracies for the information that reporters want but mostly watching them shout good news and whisper bad news. Peripatetic in pursuing his research, he was at the side of the secretary of transportation within minutes when an Air Florida jet crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, and he later used that experience in a fascinating case study of how government information officers respond during a crisis. To gather material for a book examining the U.S. media’s coverage of international news, he trailed correspondents in such places as Tokyo, Beijing, Vienna, and Prague, contrasting his observations with content analysis. In this book, that book’s mirror image, he looks at other countries’ coverage of the United States at a time when what the world thinks of the U.S. government and Americans is of considerable importance to Americans and the government. Some of his conclusions will be controversial, in part because there is no other major research on the subject to test his findings. Nearly thirty years after Steve began his work, the field of media studies has become not just an accepted part of what public policy research institutions do, but one that policymakers and our other constituencies clearly value. Steve deserves considerable credit for bringing about that change. On May 24, 2004, the Brookings Board of Trustees designated him a Senior Fellow Emeritus. In his case, the welldeserved honor for a distinguished career conveys no hint that he’s resting on that or any other of his many laurels. But still to come is a x FOREWORD volume, Newswork 7, in which he will return to the beginning of his investigations to sort out what has changed and what has stayed the same in the government/press connection in Washington. The answer, of...