Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another. Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands. The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.

By intelligence officials for intelligent people

Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.

The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy. Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.

In this fifth volume of his highly acclaimed Newswork series, Stephen Hess offers a revealing look at how the print and broadcast media cover international affairs and how foreign correspondents do their work, and concludes with suggestions for improving international coverage.

In the aftermath of September 11, the nature of international news has resumed a central place in media debates and political analysis. In the first collection of its kind, influential journalists and scholars probe the future of international news. Topics include the conglomerates, ethnocentric imbalances in news reporting, the rise of non-Anglo news channels, approaches for reconstructing the international news agenda, the impacts of new technologies of production and diffusion, international news rhetoric, and audiences' imagination of the "global" and their perceptions of international news coverage. In a dialogue that is both descriptive and prescriptive, this book begins an encounter between media practitioners, activists, and academics, constituencies that have tended to talk past each other but are now beginning to find some shared concerns.

When American evangelicals flocked to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century to fulfill their Biblical mandate for global evangelism, their experiences abroad led them to engage more deeply in foreign policy activism at home. Lauren Frances Turek tracks these trends and illuminates the complex and significant ways in which religion shaped America's role in the late–Cold War world. In To Bring the Good News to All Nations, she examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s, assesses the effectiveness of Christian efforts to attain foreign aid for favored regimes, and considers how those same groups promoted the imposition of economic and diplomatic sanctions on those nations that stifled evangelism. Using archival materials from both religious and government sources, To Bring the Good News to All Nations links the development of evangelical foreign policy lobbying to the overseas missionary agenda. Turek's case studies—Guatemala, South Africa, and the Soviet Union—reveal the extent of Christian influence on American foreign policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Evangelical policy work also reshaped the lives of Christians overseas and contributed to a reorientation of U.S. human rights policy. Efforts to promote global evangelism and support foreign brethren led activists to push Congress to grant aid to favored, yet repressive, regimes in countries such as Guatemala while imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on nations that persecuted Christians, such as the Soviet Union. This advocacy shifted the definitions and priorities of U.S. human rights policies with lasting repercussions that can be traced into the twenty-first century.