Book Notes

Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (eds.), The Media of Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1999), 312 pp.

This set of essays examines the role of the media amid two concurrent yet contradictory trends: the (relatively) peaceful demise of cold war tensions and the reemergence of turmoil and tumult in ethnic conflicts. How does media coverage explain the persistence of violent war in the absence of superpower conflicts? The essays are a carefully documented frontal assault on the tendency of much media coverage to rely on viscerally appealing accounts of primordial hostilities and the aggressive, hateful recesses of human nature. The authors—most of them sociologists and anthropologists—marshal a formidable arsenal of case studies from Bosnia, the Gulf War, and Greece to Liberia, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. There is little mincing of words or obfuscation of opinions here, and the collective effect is a vigorous precaution against simplistic, essentializing interpretations of the complex sociopolitical processes that underlie these conflicts. Equally important, the book also offers a timely reminder that the media can often play a contributory role in either ameliorating or exacerbating ethnic tensions.

Nancy E. Bernard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 245 pp.

In this intriguing book, Nancy Bernard digs beneath a simple enough coincidence in time between the rise of modern television and the cold war. What Bernard uncovers is a controversial argument: that television networks and the U.S. government acted jointly to sell the cold war to the American public. Television news, in effect, is viewed as a medium for marketing Americanism. The book documents well the close collaboration between the media and government actors and contends that public relations information from a putatively independent media was indistinguishable from plain propaganda during the cold war years. The arguments and ideological undercurrents in this book may not square comfortably with many readers, but the primary research here is vividly detailed, and the evidence entreats us to reconsider how truly democratic our media institutions really are.

William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 362 pp.

For many Americans during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War represented not only an epic struggle between superpowers in Southeast Asia, but also a Manichaean battle between government and the press at home in the United States. In Reporting Vietnam, William Hammond finds that animosity and antagonism did not always characterize government-press relations. Rather, by taking a longer historical vantage on the Vietnam era, the author shows the considerable initial shared vision between the media and the government over U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Hammond further delivers a fascinating account of how this initial relationship grew increasingly discordant and divergent. Ultimately, Reporting Vietnam defends journalists’ response to the war and impugns Richard Nixon’s oft-quoted reproof that “our worst enemy seems to be the press.” This ambitious and absorbing book will interest any reader seeking a deeper understanding of this critical moment in journalism history.

Julianne Schultz, Reviving the Fourth Estate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 304 pp.

It is customary, perhaps even habit, to refer to the media as the “fourth estate”—an independent, public-spirited, quasi-political, fourth measure of institutional checks and balances within representative democracies. Julianne Schultz takes stock of the thunderbolt speed of political, economic, and technological changes under which the media operate and asks whether the media can still hold a legitimate claim to the privileged ideal of a fourth estate. The author begins with an extended description of the historical origins of the media as a “watchdog estate.” Schultz then focuses on media practices and journalists’ attitudes in Australia. She determines that the autonomy of...