Notice to authors: Please ask your publishers to send review copies of your books to Professor Shelton Gunaratne , JIC review editor, Mass Communications Department, Moorhead State University, Moorhead, MN 56563, U.S.A.
Feldman, Ofer
Politics and the News Media in Japan.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1993. 221 pp.
What a difference a year makes. In Japan's July 1993 election, the most
important since the end of the war, the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP)
lost its 38-year hold on power. Furthermore, through LDP-bashing news and
commentary, television began to eclipse the power of LDP-biased
newspapers "that reflect only the establishment view of the news" (p. 201).
Thus Feldman's book, completed before these changes occurred, stands
as a requiem for the way things used to be. From June 1984 to August
1986, the author interviewed 70 Diet members and 45 reporters. He also
drew upon 402 questionnaires (a 57.6 percent return rate) to Diet members
and journalists.
The book concentrates on newspapers, showing Diet members' easy
access to reporters and their exploitation of that access. Its milieu is
Tokyo's Nagatacho and Kasumigaseki districts, where reporters participate
in rather than just observe Japan's political process. During
negotiations, when politicians need go-betweens to build a consensus,
reporters serve as messengers.
Journalists identify not only with sources but with colleagues,
thanks to the press (kisha) club system. Each of the 1,000 or so
different agencies of the government, political party centers, and major
economic organizations in Japan allocates a large room for use by
reporters on that beat. The most important clubs cover the prime minister
(the Nagata Club) and the LDP (the Hirakawa Club).
The 15 major Japanese news media companies dominate the clubs: "big
five" newspapers; three bloc newspapers; five television networks (NHK
and four commercial companies); and two news agencies (Kyodo and Jiji).
Press conferences, held for press club members, provide the tatemae
(surface account) for public consumption.
In addition, Diet members often give background talks (kondan) in
their own offices for a few reporters. Equally as useful for gaining honne
(the underlying truth) are yo uchi (night attacks), about 8 p.m.-10 p.m.
at a Diet member's home, with whiskey or snacks served by the Diet member's
wife; this gives reporters three to four hours to write stories before
a.m. edition deadlines.
In order to protect sources and not anger fellow club members by
scooping them, reporters use vague language in their stories, such as the
term suji mono (according to the related people). Thus one has to read
between the lines to understand the real meaning.
As a result, Feldman (p. 201) says, citizens are cynical about and
uninvolved in politics:
(T)he lack of detailed coverage of political events and the
difficulty in understanding stories tends to divert readers
from political stories to the easier ones, such as social
reportage. The reader may feel that political matters are
too difficult to understand and that they have no ability to
influence processes or institutions.
In addition to analyses such as this, Feldman provides empiricial
information in the form of tables, the result of specific survey
questions on politician-reporter interaction. The book's bibliography,
however, lacks basic works on mass communication and political
communication. As a political scientist, Feldman seems unfamiliar with
the most basic concepts of mass communication theory. He describes agenda
setting and gatekeeping in detail, but the terms themselves do not appear.
Furthermore, inexcusable editing and grammar gaffes appear.
On balance, the book provides the only detailed recent look at
Japanese political communication in English. We need more in-country
experts like Feldman, who teaches at the College of Social Sciences,
University of Tsukuba, near Tokyo, to explain Japan's inner workings to
Westerners. Let's hope that next time he gets his data to us in less than
10 years.
Anne Cooper-Chen, professor and director
Center for International Journalism
Ohio University
Fortner, Robert S.
Public Diplomacy and International Politics: The Symbolic Constructs of
Summits and International News.
Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 1994. xvi+197pp.
International shortwave broadcasting historically has been used to
promote particular causes. Most often, those causes have been defined by
governments -- democratic, communist and military alike. The mandate of the
U.S. international shortwave radio service, Voice of America (VOA), is no
different. While many radio services emerged from their country's domestic
broadcasting corporations, VOA was established in 1942 with the distinct and
expressed purpose of functioning as a promotional arm of the U.S. government.
Then and now, the VOA has served to promote U.S. culture, institutions,
thought and government policy to the rest of the globe as it has endeavored
to spread the news of U.S.-style capitalism and democracy. Throughout VOA's
history, the radio service's goals have shifted on several occasions between
that of circulating persuasion and providing information. To help define VOA's
mission and restore credibility, President Gerald Ford in 1976 signed into law
a charter that outlined VOA operating principles. According to the charter,
VOA must: (1) "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative sources of
news"; (2) "represent America" by depicting various segments of U.S. society
in a "balanced" and "comprehensive" manner; (3) "present the policies of the
United States clearly and effectively." (See Fortner, pp. 21-23, for further
discussion.)
The 1976 rehabilitation of VOA's effectiveness and competitiveness as an
international news provider is in some respects the real starting point of
Fortner's examination of international shortwave radio coverage of
four U.S.-Soviet summits between 1987 and 1990. (The book also has short
analyses of two other summit meetings: one among NATO members and another
between China and the Soviet Union.) For without the charter, the VOA, like
Radio Moscow, would have operated openly as a promotional/persuasive extension
of government. Instead, what the charter allows for in Public Diplomacy and
International Politics is the creation of a dichotomy between radio
organizations serving U.S. and Soviet interests, played off against each other
as "balanced," "objective" (if not "truthful") representations of reality
versus "propagandistic" interpretations.
In comparing the content of VOA and Radio Moscow (as well as other
shortwave radio services) broadcasts, Fortner's study explores the use of
symbolic constructs in coverage of the U.S.-Soviet summits. Using content
analysis to catalog story location, story focus, treatment of primary actors,
thematic content and use of sources, Fortner's twofold purpose is to assess
whether the use of shortwave radio contributes to information diversity as
proposed in the New World Information and Communication Order debate and,
more important to the analysis, whether the U.S. government was able to
influence how VOA reported the summit meetings.
While the relationship of Western/U.S. shortwave news services to
those in Africa, Asia and Latin America is important and continues to be
timely, Fortner's study actually rarely addresses the issue. He briefly
discusses the NWICO in connection with his analysis of radio newscasts.
In the conclusion of the book, he notes that shortwave radio should be
more prominent in NWICO debates given the history and scale of such
broadcasting (p. 170). For the reader, however, this conclusion does not
follow from any analysis presented and appears to be an afterthought.
More central to Fortner's analysis are the efforts of the U.S. government
to exercise "public diplomacy" through VOA, ultimately influencing the
language and symbols used to tell summit stories. Fortner takes his definition
of public diplomacy from the U.S. Information Agency. By public diplomacy,
Fortner is referring to propaganda or persuasion that is driven by "reason,"
"logic" and "fact," rather than "emotion." This distinction of news
propaganda forms -- where U.S. propaganda is grounded in logic and Soviet
propaganda is based on emotional appeals -- sets a narrow parameter for the
analysis. In this dichotomy, there is little opportunity to look across
propaganda forms to explore how symbolic constructs are both logical and
emotional.
This distinction of news propaganda forms also permits other very simple
dichotomies to be made. For example, in discussing reporting practices,
Fortner suggests that the Soviet approach to news is contextual or value-
laden, while the U.S. approach to news is reactive or event-based and less
likely to be based on values. Fortner does recognize that reporting practices
and values contained within them are fluid, but in opposing Soviet and U.S.
press models, the study can really only confirm difference. Fortner's book is
no polemic screed contrasting U.S. and Soviet radio broadcasts, but the
analysis is clouded by acceptance of ideologically based definitions of
propaganda versus public diplomacy and U.S. libertarian and Soviet communist
normative press models.
In the course of his analysis, Fortner examines many, many hours of
shortwave radio broadcasts from around the world to explore summit coverage.
Despite much statistical analysis of the amount, location, themes of coverage,
the actors and sources presented in the stories, the reader, in the end, still
does not know much about either the shortwave radio coverage of the summits
or the practices and ideologies that shaped the coverage. What would have
strengthened Public Diplomacy and International Politics are examples
from the actual stories broadcast and an explicit argument or discussion
of their meaning in connection with government attempts to foster public
diplomacy.
Jo Ellen Fair, assistant professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hallin, Daniel C.
We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public
Sphere.
London: Routledge. 1994. viii+187pp.
American news journalism has now spread throughout the world. First, this
has occurred through the flow of journalistic ideals and practices. Many
European television stations have sent their people "over there" to learn
how to cast news in a modern manner. The results are reflected on many news
programs "over here." But parallel to the decline of America as the
spearhead of modernity, this traffic has decreased. Second, the
de-regulation of European television has produced incentives to mould
European journalism in new ways earlier despised as "American." At the
same time, the now almost worldwide integrated news networks make American
journalism part and parcel of news journalism as such. Third, satellite
television makes American news available everywhere. CNN is just one
example.
This collection of highly readable essays, all published before, deals
with American journalism, especially television news. The nine essays
include some based on theoretical speculation. The best ones are the
theoretically informed empirical work. The empirical material covers a
period from the '60s (Vietnam War reporting), the '70s (El Salvador) and
'80s (Reagan-Gorbachev summit) to the early '90s. The ideology and praxis
of professionalism characterized this period, described as the "high
modernism" of American journalism. The book is an effort to understand the
development of professional journalism under the crossfire of commercial
forces, political forces and perceived obligations by the journalist
toward the general public. The interrelations of the three dimensions are
complex. The journalist has perceived the commercial dimension as a
change in the status of news shows as moneymakers. No longer just
lead-ins to the prime-time flow, these news shows must be profitable in
their own right.
At the same time, public relations has influenced political
campaigning and ordinary political administration. How is the independence
of "objective journalism" to be reconciled with this double commercial
pressure? Hallin shows convincingly that American television news today is
tightly packaged thematically and narratively: the news are stories told by
the journalists using soundbites of politicians' statements and other bits
of information as mere raw material for the narratives. At the same time,
the whole news show tends to be organized thematically. These conventions
derived from commercials and cinema are the main instruments for involving
the audience emotionally.
Storytelling is partisan, and journalists become active interpreters of
what is taking place at the political scene. Evidence indicates that in
order to uphold non-partisan reporting, the journalists tend to displace
the content of the narratives from the political substance to the strategy
of the political actors. Stories about how to succeed and what the
chances are for failure ("horse-race journalism") seem to dominate
campaign reporting. But this is just an example of the tendency toward
reporting the technicalities of the political process.
Hallin interprets that the journalists' positioning of themselves
as interpretative experts has a double consequence for their relationship
with the public. That relationship becomes at the same time populistic
(inclusive) and authoritarian (exclusive). By including the public in
general in the populistic discourse, the news media exclude the citizen
from political participation. Hallin says this is congruent with the basic
emptiness of the American public sphere -- an emptiness that is filled by
journalism and journalists who can occupy the position of non-elected
representatives of the people vis-a-vis those elected.
Hallin deals with the theme of exclusion, an undercurrent of the whole
book, from another perspective in the important essay on Vietnam War
reporting. The main thesis of this essay is that the right-wing
assumption that the media helped America lose the war is based on a
superficial understanding of the relationship between the practice of
objective journalism and official sources. It was not so much the media
that changed their relation to the war, but the breaking down of the
consensus of American political establishment. Reporting a political
system at war with itself was bound to be critical.
Hallin says that this breakdown of consensus highlighted the
assumed independence of professional journalism: Independence can be
understood as the degree to which dependence is invisible. When working
within a setting of broad political and cultural consensus, the "consensus
friends" are found natural and as such ideologically invisible, while the
"consensus enemies" are excluded from representation.
In this perspective, an understanding of the construction and scope of
consensus is essential. Hallin seems to say that the public sphere and the
media are the same thing. If Habermas' concept is at all relevant in an
American context, it is inappropriate to identify the public sphere solely
with the media. This means that the essential democratic problem of exclusion
cannot be empirically determined by researching the media. From that point
of view, Hallin's theoretical framework does not, in a proper sense,
relate to his empirical work. The basic problem seems to be the
fact that the critical theories informing the reasoning of the essays are
not the ones defining the object of research in the first place, i.e.,
television news.
This does not, however, diminish the value of the reported empirical
work. Nor does it reduce the value of the theoretical speculation.
However, this does remind us how difficult it is to "bridge the gap
between is and ought" (p. 32) in critical media research.
Hallin's essays forcefully argue that journalism plays an
important part in the political process. The state of the world's news
business makes this collection of essays interesting not only to media
scholars outside the United States, but also to the journalistic
profession in general.
Michael B. Andersen, senior lecturer
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
Norway
Hamelink, Cees J.
The Politics of World Communication.
London: Sage Publications. 1994. xiii+337pp.
One would think that in the midst of a telecommunications
revolution, variably referred to as the "information age,"
"information superhighway," and "globalization," there would
be less conflict, more cooperation, heightened awareness,
and mutual respect among the peoples and nations of the
world. But, despite our access to an array of highly
sophisticated and increasingly rapid communication and
telecommunication means, we are not apparently
communicating, nor are we cooperating to resolve our ongoing
conflicts without resorting to force. Such a phenomenon,
inescapably necessitates serious analysis and discussion
relative to national politics, global politics, and
communication processes in an increasingly complex global
environment.
In his book, The Politics of World Communication, Cees J.
Hamelink, a professor of international communication at the
University of Amsterdam and a past president of the
International Association for Mass Communication Research,
knowledgeably describes and examines world communication
politics, world politics, telecommunication, protection of
intellectual property rights, mass communication, culture,
development, transborder data flow, standardization of
consumer electronics, analysis of prevailing practices and
people's right to communication. This volume is a sequel to
Hamelink's earlier books: The Corporate Village (1977),
Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications (1983) and The
Technology Gamble (1988). The Politics of World
Communication, with its underlying concern about human
rights, provides a trove of facts and data on political
processes, political actors and decisions that determine
the global communication environment. Much of the
information contained in this book, according to the author,
is based on "a contribution to the chapter on trends in
regulations for the Unesco World Communication Report
(Unesco, 1989)" and "a compendium of texts on the
regulation of world communication" (p.1).
In the introductory chapter, Hamelink poses the following
questions: "How far do the prevailing political practices
address the interests of the world's people? Whose
interests are served by the multilateral agreements or by
the absence of such agreements? Are the interests of
ordinary people served by the collective practices of world
communication politics?" Furthermore, "Do people matter in
the actions and processes of world communication politics?"
He then states his "conviction that scientific work should
contribute to the protection of human rights standards"
(p.2). To answer these and other related questions, Hamelink
methodically recounts the origins and evolution of world
communication politics in Chapter 1 ("World Communication
Politics: Origins and Evolution"). With particular
attention to the most significant elements of world
communication politics, including the emergence of
international organizations and conferences, growth of mass
media, the creation of the United Nations and technological
developments, he goes on to explain the significance of
world communication and world politics.
Chapter 2 ("World Politics: Practices, Processes and
People") provides a basic framework for the study of major
issues of world communication politics, and also identifies
the key players such as state actors or sovereign nations
and non-state actors such as transnational corporations,
including NATO, OPEC, OAU and the Arab League. The chapter
then briefly traces the development of international
standards for human rights, beginning with the first U.N.-
adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Chapter 3 ("Telecommunications") deals with the
emergence of telecommunication technologies, international
regulations through ITU, communication acts and
declarations. It also addresses such issue as prevailing
political practices in world telecommunication, concerns
about frequency allocation, technical developments,
competition among corporations providing satellite services
at the regional and international levels, and provisions of
the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
Chapter 4 ("Protection of Intellectual Property Rights")
briefly describes the events that lead to the inclusion of
protection of intellectual property on the world political
agenda, beginning with the multilateral accords in Paris
(1883) and in Berne (1986). The development of reproduction
technology, commercial piracy, home taping, computer
technology, semiconductor products, electronic publishing,
electronic data bases, concerns about new technologies,
new rights and the international system of copyright
constitute the focus of this chapter.
Chapter 5 ("Mass Communication") draws attention to a
number of issues, including the use of radio for propagandistic
purposes, concerns about the role of mass media in
international relations, the issue of harmful communication,
direct satellite broadcasting and its implications, the
principle of prior consent, freedom of information, media
responsibility, discrimination, concentration of media
ownership, trade in media services and the role of
international agencies (e.g., United Nations, ITU and WARC) in
telecommunications issues.
The remaining six chapters focus on culture and cultural
diplomacy, mass media technologies and the inadequate
facilities in the less developed countries, transborder data
flow and some of its implications, international
standardization of consumer electronics and discords in
multilateral cooperation concerning mass communication. The
final chapter presents a brief assessment of political
practices vis-a-vis human rights. One of Hamelink's keen
assessments is that "If we take human rights content as an
indicator of the representation of people's interests, we
have to conclude that people do not matter in the politics
of world communication" (p. 292). Furthermore, "In order to
create world communication politics 'as if people matter'
new civil initiatives are needed. If people's interests are
to be accommodated, people will have to claim the right to
communicate" (pp. 314-315).
The book, although not entirely unique in its contents
and concepts, emphasizes the notion that freedom of
expression is a basic human right, that people's interests
should matter in the world communication politics, and that
a worldwide communication movement is indeed needed to
ensure and uphold such rights. In view of these fundamental
human rights and also the widening gaps between the "haves"
and "have-nots," "information poor" and "information rich,"
the value of Hamelink's latest contribution to the canon of
literature in world communication and international
relations becomes apparent.
Overall, the book is neither long nor easy reading.
Although logically organized, it attempts to cover too many
issues within a rather limited number of pages, making it
read more like an encyclopedia of world telecommunication
and organizations rather than a thorough discussion and
analysis of human rights. Considering that the premise of
the book is extremely vital, I would have liked to see a
more indepth analysis of political controls, media
responsibility, including people's rights and
responsibility, and less emphasis on technical aspects such
as frequency allocation, media development and descriptions
of technologies that are published elsewhere.
Nonetheless, The Politics of World Communication should
be quite useful for graduate courses in international
communication, comparative telecommunication systems and
international relations. The book provides an integrated
approach to a wide range of issues spanning international
communication, telecommunication technologies,
globalization, human rights, disparity of facilities and
resources, freedom of expression, cultural domination, media
monopoly, political and non-political actors, etc., in a
cohesive manner.
Yahya R. Kamalipour, associate professor
and director of graduate studies
Communication and Creative Arts Department
Purdue University Calumet
Hamelink, Cees J.
Trends in World Communication: On Disempowerment and Self-Empowerment.
Penang, Malaysia: Southbound Sdn. Bhd. and Third World Network.
1994. viii+168 pp.
This book is about how developments in world communication are
making people less and less informed about events and processes
around them. It shows how globalization, through consolidation
and commercialisation, is disempowering individuals and societies.
It is perhaps one of the best books on developments in world
communication. It puts the fast-moving world of communication in proper
perspective. While tracing the history of globalization, it also identifies
four major trends in world communication. The book offers suggestions for
self- empowerment and proposes a people's communication charter.
At the outset, Hamelink takes a critical look at the 1960s' concept
of global village, which is being widely used to describe the developments
in the world, especially pertaining to communication. While he accepts
that advances in communication and transport technology have made nore
contacts among people and nations a reality, he says it is wrong to project
the world as a village. He sets out to dispel the notion associated with
the metaphor.
First, he says, it is wrong to suggest that the world shown on television
has a global scope, because such an assertion ignores the very limited and
fragmented nature of international reporting. Second, it is misleading to
assume that watching TV news leads to genuine knowledge and understanding about
world events. Third, in the real village situation most people know
what is going on and know each other, but the opposite is true in the real
world: there is more going on than ever before, yet most people know very
little about it; and the majority of the world's citizens have little
knowledge or understanding of each other. Fourth, the term "global
village" assumes that the world is shrinking and becoming a smaller
place. In a real sense, however, the world is expanding. There is more
world than ever before in history: more people, more nations and more
conflicts.
The global village concept provides a very good launching pad for
Hamelink to strike at the stark reality about the development of global
communication and the impact to the world at large. As he sees it,
disparity is a clear feature of today's global communication.
For instance, information flows across the globe are imbalanced, because
most of the world's information moves among the countries in the North,
less between the North and the South, and very little flows among the
countries of the South. Wasn't this a subject much discussed in UNESCO
during the tenure of Director-General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow who, with the
backing of Third World countries, was trying to balance things up?
But now everything seems unstoppable.
What is happening is quite disturbing. As Hamelink says, today's
institutions and processes of world communication have a disempowering
effect. To put the current world picture into perspective, Hamelink
traces the history of world communication. He traces the recent situation
to the flow of transnationalization, from the North to the South, in search
of cheap labour and new markets. The real growth and signifance of world
communication began to take shape after World War II. The major
factors that steered the direction of the world communication were East/
West and North/South politics, the world economy and its key actors:
the transnational corporations and the technological innovations.
History shows that the proliferation of industrial investment
required the coordination of widely dispersed units of transnational
corporations. The result of this overall economic development was the
proliferation of a transnational communication industry across the
world. Hamelink names the U.S. communication corporations with the
largest defence contracts for military equipment, the communication
corporation with the largest defence contracts for research and
development, and the top corporation in the international
communication industry with strong direct military connections.
That brings him to the trends in world communication. The major ones
he identifies are digitization, consolidation, deregulation and
globalization, which are inter-related. Digitization provides the
technological basis for globalization as it facilitaes the global
trading of services, worldwide financial networks and the spreading
of high technology research and development across the globe.
Consolidation forms the basis for globalization, and the movement toward
global markets forces the companies to merge in order to remain
competitive in a world market. The trend in consolidation, Hamelink
says, has resulted in many huge companies in the communication industry
forming mega-mergers. One disturbing development is the oligopolization
of the communication industry, which tends to undermine the civil and
political fundamental rights of freedom of expression. The trends toward
digitization and consolidation go together with a shift from regulated,
controlled public-service type information and telecommunication services
to a competitive environment for the trading of these services by private
market operators. At the same time, the trend toward deregulation
strongly reinforces both digitization and consolidation.
Hamelink argues that the current trends in world communication
converge toward the disempowerment of people. They contribute to the
establishment of a new world order that is inegalitarian, exclusive and
elite-oriented. He suggests empowerment as a response to disempowerment.
Empowerment means giving power to the people through the strategies of
regulation, education, focus on alternative communication forms, and
technical approaches. He also suggests people's media, media owned and
controlled by the powerless with the intention to empower themselves,
people's networks, and the revolt of civil society.
The idea behind empowerment is to give a voice to the voiceless. It
sounds very positive, but it is optimistic to expect much from the
suggestion. That's probably where the people's communication
charter comes into play. The author hopes to develop this into a people's
movement. Whatever it is, the book makes a great reading.
Mohd. Safar Hasim, associate professor
Department of Communication
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Steven G Jones (ed.)
Cybersociety: computer-mediated communication and community.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. 1995. ix+241pp.
How refreshing it is to have a book about such matters as virtual reality
and the Internet which does not fall into the usual categories of 'how to
do it' or 'gee whizzery'! 'Gee whiz' books are often irritating. They
extrapolate the enthusiasm of their authors, often based on very narrow
experience, into a fanciful future world in which information systems
of some kinds have achieved revolutionary success and bring almost untellable
benefits to a significant proportion of the world's population.
Steven Jones of the University of Tulsa has produced a very different
kind of book. 'Cybersociety' may not be the ideal title for an empirical
and analytic study about how people actually use information systems.
The book usefully brings together eight individual studies of computer-
mediated communication (CMC) and computer games, mostly made by
communications and media specialists. The general theme, as indicated by
the sub-title, is to examine the relevance of the concept of community to
the interactions which occur on these systems.
The studies of CMC have little difficulty in demonstrating that group
interaction exhibit forms of behaviour which we would usually regard as
helping to define communities. MacLaughlin, Osborne and Smith develop a
taxonomy of reproachable conduct in focusing on self-regulatory
mechanisms on Usenet newsgroups. Richard MacKinnon applies Hobbesian
theory to demonstrate how Usenet users create personae and discusses how
users exhibit power through developing their personae.
Nancy Baym identifies the nature of the influences associated with the
specific character of the discussion on a single Usenet newsgroup --
rec.art.tv.soaps -- devoted to discussion of daytime soap operas. These
influences include purposes (rich and varied, public and personal),
participant characteristics (mostly women), and temporal structure (most
responses within 48 hours of original). Elizabeth Reid finds that the
virtual worlds created by MUD (Multi User Dimension) systems are
imbued with meanings which bind the users who have created them into a common
culture. Users can act out a variety of fantasies, and sometimes these
fantasies lead to real world consequences -- such as marriage.
A somewhat pessimistic chapter reports the treatment of a real world
event -- a mass murder -- which led to Usenet discussions that Aycock and
Buchignani characterise as conventional and reactionary. They found no
evidence that computer-mediated discourse raised the quality of
discussion above that which might have occurred using a different
medium. Does this indicate that CMC discussions can easily create
'communities' with behaviour patterns akin to those of lynching parties?
These five chapters are basically about the use of text systems on the
Internet. There are also three chapters which deal mainly with the use of
games standalone machines. Fuller and Jenkins identify the potential for
Nintendo type games for creating ideologies through role playing. Ted
Friedman investigates users of the SimCity game and also their discussions on
the Prodigy service about SimCity. Friedman concludes that playing such game
means identifying with the simulation itself.
Inevitably, this book raises more questions than it answers. Steven
Jones raises a question of fundamental importance in comparing the
information superhighway with the U.S. interstate road system. Jones
quotes Patton who pointed out that highways which promise to bring us
closer actually foster separateness.
Will Cybersociety share this feature with the highway system? Will
CMC create new communities but, in doing so, destroy old communities?
The nearest Jones' book comes to answering this question is a chapter
by Cheris Kramarae that identifies the dominance of maleness in Virtual
Reality. Kramarae, perhaps significantly, does not suggest that VR should
be changed so that it does not reflect and reinforce male values.
Instead, she suggests that feminist writers should use VR to present
alternative ways of thinking and imagining.
If this suggestion epitomises the kind of changes which might occur
generally, then we can perhaps detect some generalisations or hypotheses
in Cybersociety. The extent to which the communities created by CMC and
VR are real may be as problematic as the reality of communities created
in new towns or left behind in inner city areas. But whatever the precise
status of the new virtual communities, it seems likely that they will
increase in number in parallel with developments in the supporting
technologies.
What will be the relationship between the multiplication of new
virtual communities and the existing 'real world' communities? Will the
new digital communities destroy or even substantially weaken the local,
metropolitan and national communities which are dependent on non-digital
forms of communication? Or will the new digital communities just add
layers of richness, complexity and fragmentation to the world's cultural
systems?
Ray Thomas, senior lecturer
Faculty of Social Sciences
Open University
Milton Keynes, England
(r.thomas@open.ac.uk)
Manheim, Jarol B.
Strategic Public Diplomacy and American Foreign Policy: the evolution
of influence.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. x+209pp.
In All of the People, All the Time (1991), Manheim wrote of his concern
at the way in which skilled communicators were using words, pictures and
events to manipulate the American democratic process. Here he looks
with similar concern at the way American public relations consultants
employ these same communication skills to influence the domestic debate
in the public policy arena on behalf of foreign governments. He
describes such communication as ÒstrategicÓ because it is not a
seat-of-the-pants operation but based on the findings of research in
political science and social psychology and the extensive usage of social
science tools such as survey research, focus groups and content
analysis.
When the government of one country uses strategic political
communication to influence opinion in another, Manheim calls it
"strategic public diplomacy." Public diplomacy is a fashionable term
for the external public relations activities of governments aimed at
influencing opinion in a second country. The term covers a range of
activities from short-term political advocacy directed at specific
targets, the area with which this book is concerned, to the more diffuse
longer-term cultural relations aimed at establishing mutual
understanding. Works on public diplomacy are on the increase but they
tend to focus on the external public relations activities of government
departments and agencies like, in the American case, the United States
Information Agency and the Voice of America. This book shifts the focus
to the use being made of public relations consultants to devise
strategies to influence foreign-policy outcomes.
The author provides an illuminating overview of the structure of the
foreign-agent industry in the United States, identifying the client
countries, the U.S. agents and the nature of their services. He
illustrates the process with some case studies of different types of
public diplomacy campaigns, interpolates some theoretical material on
agenda setting and agenda dynamics and concludes by voicing his concern
about the political impact of this Òapplied transnational science of
human behaviorÓ (p.7) on U.S. domestic policy making. The author makes
considerable use of his previously published research.
He is able to reveal the structure and extent of the foreign
representation industry because of the reporting requirements of the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (1938), which requires agents to register
details with the Department of Justice. The foreign representation
industry (driven in part by U.S. consultants in search of business)
became Òone of the leading growth industries of the 1980s and 1990sÓ
(vii). In 1987 Japan was the leading user of the political services of
U.S. consultants followed by Israel, Canada and Saudi Arabia. The author
says that Hill and Knowlton Worldwide is a leading provider of these
services. He details Hill and KnowltonÕs controversial campaign on
behalf of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait (in the chapter on the
image-management activities of the parties involved in the propaganda
side of the Gulf War). The strategic communication services provided
included: media training, drafting speeches, speaking tours, monitoring
and analyzing legislative initiatives, distributing video materials,
focus groups and tracking surveys.
The book examines in some detail the head-of-state visit as a public
diplomacy opportunity. It contrasts a routine visit of Korean President
Roh Tae Woo in 1989 with that of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
in the same year. The aim of BhuttoÕs U.S. campaign director was to
associate Bhutto in the American mind with the fundamental American value
of democracy. A content analysis of the Legi-Slate database in the months
before and after Bhutto's visit demonstrates the success of the campaign.
The analysis showed a much stronger association of Bhutto and Pakistan
with democracy after than before the visit. The campaign succeeded in
creating a favorable psychological environment at a time when the U.S.
government was making some crucial decisions concerning Pakistan --
decisions which went PakistanÕs way. Another chapter deals with the
Olympic Games as a public diplomacy opportunity for advancing a countryÕs
foreign policy objectives.
A theoretical section based on previously published work on agenda
setting and agenda dynamics follows. The purpose of the agenda-setting
model is to explain and predict the strategies that image-management
consultants may select based on the relative visibility and valence of
the clientÕs image prior to the image management campaign. The book
includes the research that Manheim and Albritton did in the 1970s and
early 1980s, using interrupted time series content analysis of the images
of several countries in the New York Times before and after the public
relations interventions. The results, first published in 1984, showed a
correspondence between the signing of a PR contract by a country and
shifts in the image of that nation. One factor that has been shown to
work against the success of a campaign is the situation where the
campaign itself becomes the issue or where, as in the case of South
Africa, no amount of strategic communication could counterbalance the
reality of an unjust society based on the denial of the human rights of
the majority. The next chapter deals with the more complex agenda
dynamics model that Manheim originally introduced in 1987. This useful
conceptual tool takes into account the interactions between the public,
U.S. foreign policy makers and the media to reveal points at which
outside political campaigners can influence the process.
Manheim concludes with a call for Congress and for journalists to
show more awareness about the way in which strategic public diplomacy
practitioners are influencing the domestic policy process. U.S.
strategic interests are at stake. Journalists are perhaps more
vulnerable to influence when they are covering foreign affairs than when
they are on the domestic beat because of the relative lack of public
interest in foreign affairs, the limited funds available for such a
resource-expensive area and the speeding up of the foreign-policy making
process as a result of the instantaneous satellite transmission of news.
The need for vigilance will only become more necessary when foreign
governments have become so familiar with the social and political
technology that they will have no more need for U.S. consultants. The
transparency now made possible by the FARA registration requirements
will disappear. The author also sees the revolving-door syndrome --
former federal officials later working for foreign governments -- as a
point of vulnerability, even though statutory safeguards are in place.
This book makes an important contribution to the study of the
politics of persuasion. It can contribute to making the public policy
process more transparent so that citizens become aware of the role of
professional PR consultants who act on behalf of foreign governments, as
well as of political strategists of all persuasions, in the
image-management campaigns aimed at influencing their opinions, attitudes
and behavior.
Inevitably, readers with less of an Americanist perspective than
Manheim will be prompted to ask about the impact of U.S. public
diplomacy, as well as of more traditional government-to-government
diplomacy, on the integrity of the domestic and foreign policy process
in other countries. While Manheim might cite the contribution of a U.S.
PR agency to the success of the 1989 visit of Bhutto to the United
States, Iftikhar Malik (in "American Public Diplomacy and Pakistan in
the 1980s," Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XIV,
No. 2., 1990, pp. 65-90) has described how a comprehensive U.S. public
diplomacy campaign directed at Pakistan in the 1980s succeeded in
reorienting Pakistani life in every aspect away from Britain toward the
United States.
Rosaleen Smyth, senior lecturer
School of Literature & Journalism
Deakin University
Australia
Mattelart, Armand
La communication-monde.
Paris: Editions La Decouverte. 1992. 358 pp.
Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Translated by
Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1994. xv+294pp.
Mattelart, in this book, continues his fertile and often original
reflections on international communication. He investigates the shaping
of communication across the world to present a global view of
communication with its purposes and networks, as well as a history of
concepts, theories and debates that structured (even for a short time)
the scientific field of mass media.
His aim is to examine a genealogy of the major theories of
international communication by underlining the many actors involved in
this scientific field beginning with military strategic experts or war
psychologists, even subtle warriors. He shows convincingly how the
ideology of progress based on media is intertwined with political objectives.
He demonstrates how taking into account an overall perspective of
communication science through an international view can be illusory.
He proposes that only a third dimension can perhaps help understand
communication:
He says that culture is perhaps the only relevant way to analyze
and understand the movements and the phenomena that appear on the
communication scene because the global village is just a global market with
dominant actors engaged in the struggle for money. The fact is that, instead
of unifying meanings and behaviors, the internationalization of media
and the transnationalization of groups have been conducive to a cross
fertilization of cultures that mixes and elaborates new mediations and
crossbreedings. The better arguments of Mattelart's hypothesis go back to
Habermas. The author's position is based on the strength of culture
considered as a social memory that allows real and meaningful
communications among the members of an identified and historically
structured community.
This is a very useful book for both students and scholars. It
combines a clear and well-documented presentation of the past perspectives
in the mass communication field and an instructive discussion of the
underlying background. Mattelart's vast experience is reflected in this
work. A professor at the University of Rennes, Mattelart is also a
well-known invited scholar in many places. International work is his
familiar ground, especially relating to Latin America and Northern
Europe.
The introductory chapter explains the basic points around which the
book is built: war, progress and culture as real or possible frames for
understanding international communication. In the next five, Mattelart
provides in-depth analyses of the mapping of worldwide uses of modern
communication networks -- social, political and economic. After some brief
notes on what he calls "the postal modernity prehistory," he describes
an evolution that runs from the French telegraph during the revolution
(1793) to the Nielsen Audimeter (1939) -- with the Penny Post, the
telephone, the train networks and so on in between. He recognizes Charles H.
Cooley as a father of international communication who wrote in 1901 that
communication was the mechanism of social organization, as well as the
mechanism that established and developed human relations.
Step by step, one technique after another with their parallel
theories, the demonstration goes on until what the author calls "the
ideology clash" at the end of the '30s, before World War II. He
considers it a decisive starting point for the development of the world
mapping in communication. Baghdad is his time terminus. Of course, every of
us have in memory the pictures of CNN and the disinformation issues about
Desert Storm.
From Chapter 6 through Chapter 10, the author uses another frame to
try to analyze the links between society and the electronic era. He shows
the strong stakes of the various interests that shaped the theoretical field.
In his critique, he demonstrates that ruptures and upheavals caused a
shift from an ideology of progress to a communication ideology through the
means of business management, considered as the management norm in social
relationships.
Chapter 11, however, underlines the fact that the free
circulation of knowledge and knowhow has helped singular, different
cultures to appear, to express and to interfere with each other. The
attempts to go back to proper territories and spaces, and to separate
identities (with the risk to retire within) may mean that every community
has to be taken into account to understand the reverse movement of
particular cultures against an international trend toward
uniformity.
The book's conclusion, the so-called enigma, does not come to an
optimistic end, rather to a new but realistic issue: how to balance the
multicultural and the multiethnic challenges and the impossible quest for a
global and common identity to develop an understanding framework for
international communication? This is a very stimulating question for present
and future communication professionals.
Marie-France Kouloumdjian, professor
Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/CNRS
France
McCoy, Thomas S.
Voices of Difference: Studies in Critical Philosophy and Mass Communication.
Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press. 1993. xi+276pp.
In an innovative way, Thomas McCoy relates the work of such French critical
studies theorists as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault to
communication theory and practice. He casts the theoretical net wider to
concentrate on what he calls critical phenomenology and examines how
today's journalists tackle the Kantian question: Can humanity use reason
to overcome ignorance and domination? He examines the pros and cons of the
lipservice to objectivity in Western journalism which he says "has brought
regularity, accountability, fairness and balance, even justice to the
practice of informing the public about society" but has also, too often,
"worked as an agency of power" as though their interests were always those
of most of the people. "Regularly, this is not the case," he asserts.
If you dislike delving into the abstract concepts of philosophy, steer
clear of this text. But the examples he chooses are interesting. They are
mostly drawn from the United States but also include (as examples of the
difficulties of getting opposing sides to agree on language) the 1989
protest by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, and coverage of
American troops "defending democracy" in Grenada "in the same spirit as the
Chinese troops were the 'defenders of the nation.'" When the bid for
democracy was brutally crushed, Deng Xiaoping said on China's national
news, "We do not approve of great democracy. Great democracy is avoidable,
and this requires having small democracy." McCoy claims that when
reporting events in El Saldavor, The New York Times sticks to political
parameters established in Washington and only occasionally publishes
anything that would upset the State Department.
The book interleaves philosophy and mass communication, first explaining
the phenomenological method and then discussing the editorial issues and
finance and marketing practices of a U.S. magazine of the 1960s and 1970s,
Ramparts, a left-liberal publication which built up quite a circulation
(125,000 in newsstand sales and 120,000 subscriptions at one stage) for an
anti-establishment journal which "increasingly served to expose the
government, to reveal the truth - a task which it felt to be humanistic and
ethical, not primarily logical or ideological - to interpret events
according to their human impact" (p. 35). Ramparts was strongly in favour
of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1966, when the mainstream media there
strongly supported the war effort.
In discussing the ethics of difference, McCoy compares and contrasts Max
Scheler's ethics of value with Foucault's aesthetics of existence, Levinas'
metaphysics of desire and Jacques Derrida's views on difference. As far as
I know, none of these four has had much to say on mass communication and
those who have not read them in the original texts will have to take
McCoy's interpretations as a fair extrapolation. He attempts the leap from
critical phenomenology to the practices of professional newsmakers who are
"actively engaged in the construction of social reality" by, as Schudson
says, presenting a web of mutually self-validating facts. Those
journalists and proprietors infatuated with "the objective method" and
obeying what they see as an economic imperative are in effect agreeing to
"standardise the product as much as possible so as to minimise the risk of
losing a minimally acceptable share of the market" - they compete for
market share via advertising and marketing tactics and production
efficiencies, as Lance Bennett writes in his 1988 book, News: the Politics
of Illusion.
McCoy says the diversity of the main U.S. media is now much less - down
from 50 corporations in 1983 to 27 in 1987 - and these are increasingly
interlocked with major industries and banks. (A more up-to-date figure
than 1987 would have been useful.) The same increasing concentration in
the print media is being found in many other countries. More diversity is
possible in radio and television but McCoy does not comment much on
communication of difference in newer technologies such as satellite and
cable television. He does echo Neil Postman's criticism that TV news and
current affairs tends to trivialise debate, because television stresses its
entertainment objective and packages most stories into segments of 45 to 90
seconds: "discontinuity disguises import and disconnects thought" while
surreptitiously altering attitudes and perceptions. Just after a murder
scene or an international crisis, the program cuts to the weather forecast
or a commercial for a really important product such as toilet paper!
During prime time, crime including the work of police, judges and lawyers
is televised at 10 times the rate it happens in real life. Heavy viewers
become more fearful and more conservative on such issues as civil rights,
minorities and law and order.
The text discusses issues of surveillance, privacy and exchange of
electronically based information on a scale never envisioned by classical
theorists. McCoy mentions the case of the deputy sheriff who one night at
work ran the names of his family through the U.S. National Crime Information
Center. He found that 10 of the 11 were listed, including his mother who
had attended a noisy college party in her youth, one where the neighbours
called police to complain. His stepfather was in the computer because once
he called local police to report that he had received a bad cheque. Many
of the surveillance reports held on computer are faulty or wrong.
Power maintains the public realm, McCoy states, and public opinion in the
public realm supports and continues power. Bureaucratic rule weakens both
the public and private spheres: "nobody" is in control, so no one accepts
responsibility (p. 169). He does not go into detail about the problematic
term, "public opinion." McCoy is a fan of Bill Moyers' cultural
journalism; there is extensive reference to the former CBS correspondent
and documentaries editor in the chapter Process and Practice. Moyers said
in an interview with Noam Chomsky, "A lot of people complain that the (U.S.)
media are unpatriotic, disloyal, too liberal" but Chomsky replied that if
you take actual incidents and cases, the media are remarkably subservient
to power. As Moyers remarked, that's not how the media see it; [most
journalists feel] that their news judgments rest on unbiased, objective
criteria. In television, the pictures become the story - too often the
"news" is a manufactured event. Many examples spring to mind, and these
are thick on the ground during election campaigns in most countries. In
the one cited in the book, presidential candidate George Bush at a flag
factory linked the boom in production to America doing well. The pictures
showed Bush kissing people and much flag-waving: cut to a small child,
dressed as Uncle Sam. The reporter, Brit Hume, tries to criticise the
obvious public relations stunt but the words do not register with viewers.
The visuals do. The message is: this is America and the flags are flying
high (p. 138).
This is a difficult text for those readers not firmly grounded in
philosophy but with a dictionary in hand it is possible to wade through and
gain interesting theoretical perspectives on international journalism and
communication. Many terms used have somewhat different meanings in
philosophy to the everyday meaning. Those without much knowledge of
divergent views on U.S. mass communication will also be enlightened.
Richard Phillipps, coordinator of public relations
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Western Sydney, Nepean
Merrill, John C., ed.
Global Journalism: Survey of International Communication. 3d ed.
White Plains, N.Y.: Longman Publishers. 1995. xvii+414pp.
Since the first edition of John Merrill's Global Journalism was
published in 1983, much has changed in the world itself and in the study of
international communication. Geopolitical changes have altered world maps
and forced the revision of long-held notions of world press systems. At
the same time, scholars with diverse cultural, geographical and
philosophical backgrounds have engaged in the study of international
communication informed by distinct perspectives and understandings.
Perhaps there is little surprise that the new edition has taken many of
those changes seriously.
The changes between the second and the third editions of the book are
pronounced. Those changes include topical and geographical additions to
the book's offerings, with a notably expanded list of authors from a wide
range of backgrounds and perspective. While the second edition had already
begun to move in that direction, the third edition has lived up to the
promise of the second. The 23 contributors offer a rich pool of
expertise and experience.
As with its predecessors, this edition of Global Journalism is
divided into two parts. The first offers global perspectives on
communication and media issues. The second provides chapters on specific
geographic regions. There are noticeable changes to both. While the first
part revisits several familiar topics, in several cases the contributors
have changed. Global media philosophies are explored by Edmund B.
Lambeth. An overview of media systems is provided by Lowndes F.
Stephens, followed by a chapter on news collection and flows by Kuldip R.
Rampal. Paul Grosswiler takes another look at continuing media
controversies. The new edition includes additional chapters: on global
advertising and public relations by Douglas Ann Newsom and Bob J. Carrell;
a survey of freedom of the press around the world by Robert L. Stevenson;
a consideration of international journalism ethics by Dean Kruckeberg;
and, a study of barriers to media development written by Tim Gallimore.
On the surface, the changes in the first section promise good
things. On a closer reading, however, they are somewhat disappointing. One
of the dangers of this approach to a text is that writing style and
caliber vary from chapter to chapter. And the dangers are evident here. In
addition, though the titles of the chapters promise a lot they don't
always deliver. Certainly, the high quality chapters on news flows
and media controversies are the exception. Too much of the other chapters
turn out to be somewhat tendentious rehashings of the "Four Theories of
the Press" and ethnocentric arguments for the true press freedom -- the
American kind.
What saves the book is the second part. Substantially revised, it is
characterized by much more even and compelling writing by experts who
know well the parts of the globe they explore. In place of the earlier
chapter on Europe, this edition offers chapters on Western Europe
and something called "East Central and Southeastern Europe, Russia and the
Newly Independent States" -- certainly a critical change even if the title
of the new chapter is somewhat unwieldy. As before, the Middle East and
North Africa are handled together, but the "Africa" chapter of the second
edition has become the "Sub-Saharan Africa" in this edition, and though
the contents doesn't reflect the change, in the chapter itself there are
subdivision for East, West and Southern Africa -- each written by a
different contributor.
And the contributors may mark one of the important ways in which this
edition is enhanced. As in the second edition, Christine Ogan authors the
chapter on the Middle East and North Africa: and Anju Grover Chaudhary and
Anne Cooper Chen tackle the chapter on Asia and the Pacific. There are
some worthy additions. Owen V. Johnson tackles what stands now where the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe once stood. And, fittingly, Gonzalo Soruco
and Leonardo Ferreira take on Latin America and the Caribbean. Herbert
Strentz and Vernon Keel contribute the section on North America; while
Arnold S. de Beer, Francis P. Kasoma, Eronini R. Megwa and Elaine Steyn
share the task of writing on Sub-Saharan Africa.
How the book can be read is not an important issue in a text that
aims for an audience of advanced undergraduates or entry-level graduate
students. On that score, the introduction and several of the chapters in
the first section seem extremely abstract, accessible to another scholar but
arguably tough for someone new to the subject. The chapters of the second
section, however, provide a valuable mix of introduction and explanation.
These chapter authors are not afraid to provide concrete details of
historical context, and they do not shy away from explaining their terms.
The impression one gets is that the authors are so interested in their
subjects that they are keen to share their findings.
The mechanics of the book has also changed in noticeable ways.
Still in paperback, the third edition has a catchy multi-colored cover
that appeals to the eyes. The new edition is thicker than the second, but
still thinner than the first -- a feat it accomplishes in spite of a the
fact that it is longer than either. The difference has been made up by
reducing the size of the type. Size aside, however,the text seems easier to
read, with the exception of the index, which is yet again smaller. Maps,
which were a regular feature in the last edition, have been enhanced; and
their number has been increased to reflect the book's additional
geographic range.
In the first two editions, citations for additional reading were
brought together at the end of the book, though they were broken down by
chapter heading. In this edition, however, the bibliographies have been
placed at the end of the relevant chapters and appear to have been
bolstered considerably. The index, however, appears less thorough than the
one in the second edition. There appear to be fewer cross-references and
many of the broader categories like "Newspapers" and "Television" have
disappeared.
Catherine Cassara, assistant professor
School of Mass Communication
Bowling Green State University
Reeves, Geoffrey
Communications and the 'Third World.'
London and New York: Routledge. 1993. xiv+277pp.
The scope of Reeves' topic is enormous, and this has led to a number of
problems in this study. Reeves does not define exactly the perimeters of
"communications" but by implication includes in the term a wide range
from the mass media such as radio, television, newspapers, etc., to folk
art and popular culture, which he confines to theatre and "oral
communications." Reeves subsumes the latter two, without discussing its
problematics, as part of the media. A more convincing case needs to be
put for such an inclusion because the term "media" is more commonly used
for the mass media such as newspapers and magazines, radio, television
and films, rather than for the "live" performances of theatre.
The usefulness of the term "Third World" certainly needs examination, and
Reeves does this in considerable detail. However, contrary to his thesis
of the indadequacy of the label, the book proceeds to treat the range of
countries and nations embraced by the term as a viable grouping.
Consequently, the book shows signs of straining to find common features
among such disparate countries as those in Africa and in Asia in relation
to their communications institutions, practices and products. A more
rigorous investigation of the socio-cultural fabric of these countries of
which communications is a thread would have been more useful. It is unclear
whether the author is trying to dispel the notion of the coherence of the
term or examine the diversity of these countries with regard to
communications and to pull together some common threads despite the
diversity.
There is also, what I feel, as merely a nod to non-'Western' scholarship:
"Where possible this study makes use of analyses and research findings
produced by writers in countries which form the principal subject. A
frequent criticism of analyses of 'Third World' communications is that they
are written from a Western or Eurocentric perspective which ignores
traditions of critical analysis in 'Third World' countries" (p.vi).
This is a laudable aim, and the vast range of sources of analyses (primarily
from 'Western' sources) is impressive. However, there is inadequate
examination of these analyses apart from the disclaimer that "it is not
entirely clear how Latin American and other analyses differ in significant
and substantial ways from those written from 'western' perspectives since the
dominant theoretical traditions and shifts have been largely shared:
functionalism and modernization theory, cultural and media imperialism
perspective, cultural dependency perspectives, and Marxist and
structuralist critiques of dependence" (p. vi). This only serves to
confuse the issue. Such a disclaimer does nothing to indicate the
considerable amount, scope and rigour of analyses produced by
non-"Western" scholars. At the same time, sources and analyses in the
languages of Asian and African countries other than in the "colonial"
languages of English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and other languages are
not even alluded to, let alone examined.
Ultimately, this is a disappointing book not only for all the above
reasons but also because basic socio-cultural issues such as gender and
ethnic differences (including the problem of linguistic differences and the
construction of ethnic identities) in communications are not examined and
debated, although there is some attempt to address the class differences. A
book that purports to be a cultural analysis of communications in such a
spread of countries must surely engage with these issues in a more rigorous
manner.
Chua Siew Keng, associate professor and head
Centre for Media Communciations and Asian Studies
Southern Cross University
Australia
Semetko, Holli A., and Klaus Schoenbach.
Germany's "Unity Election": Voters and the Media.
Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1994. xvii+151p.
The quantitative side of German communication research is
impressive. Most German universities have a program in
"Publizistik" or "Kommunikationswissenschaft," both translated
as communications rather than journalism. German is one of the
few languages other than English with its own body of literature
that includes both research journals and a surprisingly large
output of academic books. And German researchers have
contributed significantly to the development of contemporary
communication theory. Any overview of the field will include
German modifications to familiar theories such as agenda-setting
and original contributions such as Noelle-Neumann's spiral of
silence/climate of opinion.
Germany's Unity Election is based on extensive data
collection, which is characteristic of modern German research.
It included a three-month content analysis of political coverage
of 15 newspapers and five TV networks, an eight-day field study of
one of the leading evening news programs, and surveys in both
East and West. In the West, data were derived from a two-wave
panel of about 1,200 adults (attenuated to 892 in the second
interview). In the East for political and administrative
reasons, the panel was replaced with two parallel cross-
sectional surveys of about 1,100-1,200 respondents.
The authors are professors, respectively, at Syracuse University
in New York and the University of Music and Theater in Hannover. Both
are at home in both countries and in the common research tradition.
This triangulated data-collection effort focused on the end
of the German national election of December, 1990, the first
time voters in the newly unified country chose a national
government. Not surprisingly, unification itself was the main
issue. The euphoria that had accompanied the opening of the
intra-German border a year earlier faded quickly, and second
thoughts about Helmut Kohl's rush to unity rose just as quickly.
In the West, the concern was the financial sinkhole of
rebuilding the East; in the East itself, the collapse of the old
system and takeover by the Wessies produced fear and resentment.
The setting of the campaign was unique. Surely the self-
destruction of communism in Europe will figure in history as the
most important event in the late 20th century, and the patching
together of Mitteleuropa as the biggest challenge. It was an
event virtually no one, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ronald
Reagan excepted, predicted. As Timothy Garton Ash documents in
his In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent,
Germany's response was frequently muddled and uncertain. The
long-range outcome is still uncertain. From the perspective of
the social scientist, it was a unique laboratory on a grand
scale: a single nation coming together after a half-century of
isolated experimentation with the two competing ideologies of
the 20th century.
Curiously enough, the authors found little evidence of the
great events. The election itself received relatively little
coverage, voters were relatively uninterested, and the outcome
was largely predictable. Coverage was professional and
detached, hardly adequate to document the final chapter of the
Cold War and at odds with the general assertion that German
journalism is more partisan than the Anglo-American equivalent.
A less-than-dramatic conclusion of the book was that television
should give more attention to parties, especially the small
parties, outside the government.
The analysis in this short, 150-page book is also
limited, almost a first pass at a complex data set. For the
most part, the authors discuss the components of the data separately
and without the imaginative integration of multiple sources and
innovative methods that are typical of German Publizistik
research. The most complex analysis was a cross-lagged
correlation of the panel data, the technique introduced to
communication research a generation ago when agenda-setting was
unveiled. Effects of the great social experiment -- differences
between East and West -- get virtually no attention.
Social science has not been able to demonstrate massive
influence of mass media in any country. We may be too close to
the phenomenon under observation to see it clearly, and it may
be that media really do not have much influence most of the
time. But that needs to be tempered with a reminder that small
effects can have momentous consequences within a political
system. Presumably even small media influences can lead to
politically significant outcomes. The modest correlations and
traditional conservatism of social science represented in this
book should not be equated with a conclusion that media are
unimportant in democracy or without enough influence to warrant
our attention.
A note on the publisher. Hampton Press grew out of the
recent meltdown of Ablex and promises to be one of the few
important non-university publishers specializing in social
science. This volume, well bound but not attractively printed,
is the second of a political communication series edited by
David Paletz of Duke University. The seven titles available or
in preparation promise an eclectic definition of the field.
Robert L. Stevenson, professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stevenson, Robert L.
Global Communication in the Twenty-First Century.
New York: Longman, 1994. xvi+382 pp.
Judging by the number of volumes churned out yearly, global communication has
clearly come of age. Much of the literature of the global communication
revolution, however, belongs to the category of "globaloney," which is
how Mrs. Henry Booth Luce, in her typically blunt fashion, once
characterized all talks of globalization. In the dominant discourse of
the day, the electronic superhighway is increasingly clamoring for
attention as an electronic superhypeway. The discourse often omits such
disconcerting facts as that the City of Tokyo has more phone lines than
the whole continent of Africa. Happily, three recent textbooks by Howard
Frederick, Robert Fortner and Robert L. Stevenson provide correctives
to the prevailing facile generalizations. The three books together
provide instructors of international communication with three thoughtful
choices ranging in perspective from critical to liberal, and
conservative. Ambitious instructors may wish to consider adopting all
three!
Stevenson's contribution has several strengths. It is written in a
clear and engaging style suitable for undergraduates. It combines
intercultural with international perspectives suitable for courses that
focus on both. It is situated in the traditions of journalism
education. It offers few theories and lots of facts suitable for those
instructors and students of communication who tend to dislike theories.
Chapters are organized around the familiar categories of Western,
Communist, Authoritarian, Development and Revolutionary media systems.
They also end with chapter summaries, bibliographies, questions for
discussion, and data bases replete with facts.
Stevenson argues that four trends characterize global communication,
including an Anglo-American dominance, resurgence of cultural conflict,
beginnings of a global culture, and the triumph of independent
journalism. His last point raises a question on how independent are the
commercial media from advertisers, increasing ownership concentration,
and their Media Moguls. Comparative studies of media systems would
suggest that structural pluralism in media ownership is a far stronger
guarantee of liberty and pluralism of voices than the pious wishes of
media professionals and scholars. (See Majid Tehranian, Technologies of
Power: Information Machines and Democratic Prospects. Norwood, N.J.:
Ablex, 1990.) Would it not be more accurate to argue that there is, in
fact, no independent media, that the freedom of the media belongs to
those who have one, that whoever pays the piper calls the tune; that
every media system pursues the interests of those who own and control it?
Although Stevenson is carefully even-handed in his discussions of
each trend, he largely fails to provide adequate explanation for the
dynamics among them. This, in part, is due to the largely atheoretical
feature of the textbook. Absence of a theoretical approach in the book,
of course, does not mean lack of theory. Chapter 5 is almost entirely on
normative theories. Since we are all condemned to be theoretical, human
understanding operates within the framework of foundation myths and
models of good society that are programmed into us since childhood and by
which we monitor our own and others' behavior. Stevenson's bias is toward
free and independent media. Chapter 5 thus provides a framework for the
understanding of the current ideological debates on the media;
but, given its bias, it underestimates the problems of freedom and
independence in commercial media while largely ignoring other
possibilities for media structures besides government control. Public
and community media thus receive a short shrift.
A more theoretical approach to understanding would make the
implicit postulates and models explicit in order to open them up to
critical and empirical examination. It would raise questions on the
fundamental issues of communication and control in society. In this
fashion, issues of structure and ownership as well as the audiences'
cultural resistances and uses and gratifications become more important
than the simple ideological protestations of "the theories of the press."
Stevenson does provide abundant data on the global trends toward
concentration of media ownership (pp. 19-21), but he argues that
"ownership and control are not the same thing ..., that the owners
"look at the bottom line on the financial statements more than at
editorial page policy," and that "U. S. media are controlled by its
customers" (p. 117). His arguments, however, are not persuasive for one
simple reason. News, information and entertainment are not the same as
other consumer commodities. Apart from their profit motivation,
commercial media systems are similar to government and public media in
that they are also engaged in production of legitimacy. The commercial
media not only try to deliver audiences to advertisers; they also attempt
to deliver legitimacy to those in power for the system in which they
operate. That is clearly why even the most authoritarian governments are
willing to commercialize their media but won't let them get into
unfriendly hands.
An internationally recognized international communication
scholar, Stevenson shows an admirable commitment to the principles of
free and independent media. He is also sanguine about the global
prospects of independent journalism. He offers the role of the media in
"the death of communism" and "the end of history" as evidence for his
hopes (pp. 13-17). Although the end of communism in Central Europe and
the former Soviet Union has proved to be a mixed blessing, and Fukuyama's
"end of history" thesis has been somewhat discredited by the rise
of ethnic, religious, tribal and nationalist conflicts that promise another
long chapter in history, Stevenson does have a point. The accelerating
dissemination of news and information around the world has broken traditional
territorial and cultural boundaries. However, the new technologies are
exhibiting equally powerful dual effects -- concentrating and dispersing
powers, homogenizing and differentiating cultures, globalizing and localizing
identities.
To assume hopefully that the democratic effects will be more
powerful is unwarranted unless we can also show that the free
institutions of a civil society are simultaneously in formation,
employing the media for expanding the public sphere of discourse and
democratic will formation. There is, unfortunately, no mention of "civil
society" in Stevenson's book, let alone any serious analysis of the
relations between media structures and democratic institutions. It seems
to this reviewer that democratic pluralism is impossible without
pluralism in the structures of media ownership and control, and neither
is possible without the existence of those voluntary associations
that have historically played a critical role in democratic societies by
defending the rights of citizens and consumers against government and
corporate encroachments. Despite these quibblings, however, Stevenson's
contribution provides a thoughtful, well-documented and readable
textbook that could generate lively discussions in classrooms.
Instructors and students of intercultural and international communication
owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Majid Tehranian, professor
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Senior Fellow, Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
Wark, McKenzie
Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1994. xvii+253pp.
This is a book about vectors or, as Wark often puts it, "the vector" in
the singular. What is a vector? Not a line with an arrow on the end of
it as studied in school geometry but rather, as Paul Virilio describes
it, a mobile stream of information or images or narrative without direction
but filled with force. And it is a timely book just because the vector
is a concept that we have now to come to terms with. It will help us move
past those still dominant models of communication for which a message
remains, simply, information passed from A to B within a specified
technology.
Wark elaborates his account of vectors. Unlike messages, they, in
theory at least, move anywhere: they have no fixed destination. Which
means not just that their impact in any particular zone or local context
is unpredictable but that they have no fixed meaning. Furthermore, the
kind of vectors which he is interested in are events themselves. In
fact, Wark argues that they have enormous ontological weight: today they
constitute a "third nature" to set aside Hegel's old "second nature."
For him, we now situate ourselves in a world of transmitted images,
information and stories as much as (more than?) a world of constructed
things (from houses and roads to, say, socks and hairpins).
But Virtual Geography does not set out to provide a theory of vectors
in general. Rather, it describes four specific vectorilised events: the U.N.
(U.S.)-Iraqi war; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the so-called Tiananmen
Square massacre and the October 1989 worldwide stockmarket crash. One
question arises immediately: why these events rather than others? It's
especially puzzling that the biggest of all recent global media events --
the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union -- is absent. It is all the more
mysterious because, as Wark makes clear, his book too belongs to the
vectorial system, even if its trajectories are very limited. But if the
book is more a response to the big global vectors than a principled
enquiry into them, why is the biggest global vector of them all absent?
In its absence, questions about Wark's principles of selection or, more
tellingly still, about what counts as useful knowledge of the vector from
within the vector, loom especially large.
I suppose that the easy way to deal with these questions would have
been to take the materialist option. Wark could have anlysed, for
instance, the technologies, policy frameworks and political economies
through which the flows he is describing are put into circulation. How,
for instance, was the mediatization of the Iraq war shaped? by what
satellite systems were images broadcast? by what PR institutions were
they produced? what legal rulings structured the system through which
they were transmitted (the U.S. finsyn laws, for instance, which helped
allow cable networks such as CNN to flourish)?
These, however, are not the kind of questions that Wark asks -- and
for good reason. He is not interested in the global media's material
conditions of possiblity; he is interested in their effects both on
everyday life and on cultural theory itself, recognising that "everyday
life" only exists within his vector through the lens of cultural theory.
Nonetheless, his neglect of the vector's materiality limits the book in
one big way. It is not as if "the vector" travels everywhere, however
directionless it may be. Who, worldwide, actually did participate in
these media events? Not everybody by a long shot. The vector travels
along paths blazed by capital as Wark knows: money poverty and what some
people are (strangely) calling "information poverty" (i.e., lack of access
to certain vectors) go hand in hand, and it would have been useful to
have been given a more detailed, less virtual, geography of these
differences.
Wark could also have written -- or at any rate attempted to write --
a truth-telling book a la Chomsky, distinguishing between the reality and the
representations of these four great global happenings, but he cannot take
this line for two reasons. First, the vector's meanings change from zone
to zone so that no stable global reality/representation relation can be
posited; and second, these events happen in the media as much as on the
ground so that the reality/representation distinction is not appropriate
to begin with. For these reasons Wark claims that he writes not as a
truth-teller but as a story-teller, adding narrative value to the
vector's semiotic stream. Yet, in the end, he finds it hard not to make
truth claims. Especially in his chapters on China and the stockmarket
crash, he presents richer and fuller narratives and analyses than we
usually encounter in the broadcast media. As soon as he does so,
however, he invites scepticism from another direction. What is his
authority? He is no expert on Chinese politics or financial markets, nor
does he claim to be. Indeed his grip on both, from my own amateur
perspective, is a little shaky. As a truth-teller, he is sandwiched between a
kind of investigative journalism and academic expertise.
This is not a serious problem though: Wark is not a truth-teller, he
is a theorist and a moralist. Here, however, we do strike more serious
difficulties -- because Wark's theory does not fit his morality. What is his
theory? It takes the form of an interesting and original grand narrative: as
the vector and capital's empire expands globally, third nature (the
consequence of a postfordist output of images, information, services) is
subsuming second nature (the consequence of commodity production). This
process, however, is disrupted by "logic bombs" or "noise," especially
when global capital and vectors move too quickly through localised ways
of life and interests where third nature is not yet dominant. The four
events that Wark describes are, it seems, exactly such disruptions; and they
provide opportunities for intellectuals (like Wark) to link up with the
vector, adding what he calls "semiotic baggage" to its stories and
information.
The trouble is that his morality is less sophisticated than this. For
him as moralist, global media vectors and the capital expansion from
which they are inseparable belong to a larger, almost world-historical,
tendency toward "abstraction," virtuality and the erasal of history. It
is a tendency he deplores. As a moralist does not just add narrative and
theoretical value to the vector flows, he tries to use history or memory
to outwit the vector, and searchs for "tactics" to keep it at bay. These
tactics and memories, I think, (though this is not made explicit) are
aimed at maintaining communication and community in a non-vectorial way.
Does Wark make any attempt to reconcile his morality and his theory?
Not explicitly. But the book does present a cohering figure: that of the
author himself. For this is also a self-portrait, a picture of life in an
inner-city Sydney apartment, littered with tools of the intellectual's trade:
magazines, papers, books, coffee cups; a cat for company, a partner for love;
TV set twittering ceaselessly in the background; a computor and modem centre
stage. A life pulled into frenetic activity periodically as a global logic
bomb goes off and the urge to theorise and moralise grips ... It is a vivid
and, for me, engaging, portrait so much so that the writing's contradictions
and limits fall away. What sticks in the mind is: so this is what it looks
like to live an everyday-life thinking in or on or about (what is the right
preposition?) the vector.
Simon During, professor
English and Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
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