American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era

American Journalism and International Relations arguesthat the American press' disengagement from world affairs hascritical repercussions for American foreign policy. GiovannaDell'Orto shows that discourses created, circulated, and maintainedthrough the media mold opinions about the world and shape foreignpolicy parameters.This book is a history of U.S. foreign correspondence from the1840s to the present, relying on more than 2,000 news articles andtwenty major world events, from the 1848 European revolutions tothe Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. Americans' perceptions of othernations, combined with pervasive and enduring understandings of theUnited States' role in global politics, act as constraints onpolicies.Dell'Orto finds that reductive media discourse (as seen duringthe 1967 War in the Middle East or Afghanistan in the 1980s) has anegative effect on policy, whereas correspondence grounded inevents (such as during the Japanese attack on Shanghai in the 1930sor the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991) fosters effectiveleadership and realistic assessments.