World's Best-Informed Public?

WORLD'S BEST-INFORMED PUBLIC? Hamid Mowlana he shift of international relations from cold war "bipolarity" to current "multipolarity" has made the conduct of international politics quite complex in the 1980s. The rise of the Third World as a viable political force, the pervasive existence ofcritical economic dependencies, and intense economic competition between industrial capitalist countries have generated a plethora of "informed publics" newly aware of the influence of foreign affairs in areas previously considered to be the exclusive domain of domestic politics. Environmentalists, for example, see domestic ecological questions in an international context, peace movement groups look at national defense budgets critically, and local labor and trade associations concern themselves with U.S. international economic policies because of the challenge from Japan. The endless flow of information and news has acquired a new urgency in foreign policy. On the national level the interface between foreign policy and communications media has increasingly come under scrutiny. This new emphasis, wrought by technological progress in electronic communication and data handling, has been reflected in major world events ranging from the Islamic revolution in Iran to the liberation movement in South Africa. Other factors that have focused attention on the integral relationship between foreign policy and the media are the role of the media (especially television) in international conflict, in Hamid Mowlana is professor ofinternational relations and director ofthe program in international communication studies at the School of International Service, The American University, Washington, D.C. His most recent book is Global Information and World Communication: New Frontiers in International Relations. Ill 178 SAIS REVIEW legitimizing events and personalities, and in agenda-setting. Also worthy of comment are the role of the media as an alternative source of international diplomacy, career shifts of leading personalities from government to media and vice versa, and the growing centralization of the foreign-policy process. In the United States the media generally perform four essential roles characteristic of their structural and historical development. The first duty of the media is to observe. As observers of the world situation, the news media perceive their primary enterprise to be the reporting of the most important news and world events. The second duty of the media is to participate in the policy process, exchanging information and interpretations with policymakers in press conferences, background briefings, and informal conversations, as well as within media circles. The major newspapers and magazines provide a common body of knowledge and parameters of discussion, not without an implicit point of view. The media's third role is to catalyze. The public and interest groups use the media to express their concerns in foreign affairs. Here the so-called foreign-policy public (consisting of policy experts, interested and attentive persons, and nonparticipating persons) use the media individually, institutionally, or collectively to express their opinions with the hope of influencing foreign policy. The fourth obligation of the media in the United States is to make a profit. As commercial enterprises, the media are responsible to their shareholders and thus are loyal to the economic and political traditions of which they are a part. Has the coverage of international affairs by the U.S. media changed in the past years? How does the coverage of the American media compare with that of the foreign media? How do the various functions of the media in the United States affect the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy? In answering these questions, a number of patterns emerge. The "most important news of the world" is not necessarily found in the daily newspaper or even on the television screen. The selection and dissemination of the day's most important news is a function of a nation's cultural and political norms, in which ethnocentrism and economic factors play a decisive role.1 For example, the American media are fascinated with speed and "exclusivity," often to the exclusion of quality. Because of this drive and the advances in telecommunications technology , the daily media have been overloaded by a quantity and variety of opinion. On the average, only 11 percent of all stories in American 1. See for example James Trezise, James Glen Stovall, and Hamid Mowlana, Watergate: A Crisisfor the World—A...