Brent Cunningham, “Re-thinking Objectivity” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August, 2003.
Lengthy discussion of questions relating to journalistic principles of “objectivity” and “truth” in the post 9/11 and Iraq war contexts. Draws on the thinking of James Carey, Herbert Gans, E.J. Dionne, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and others. Looks at reliance on official sources, computer assisted research, nonstop news cycles, and the Bush Administration’s case for the Iraq war.
Claes de Vreese, Communicating Europe: Next Generation Democracy. British Council & Weber Shandwick Public Affairs, April 2003.
Based on a study of broadcast media across the EU, de Vreese concludes that too often the EU’s strategy is to focus on sending out pro-European messages, rather than presenting the EU as a political system with room for disagreement, discussion and debate. Contains recommendations on how the EU must change including the redesign of institutions to take account of political communication and news framing. Available at the Foreign Policy Centre‘s website.
DiploFoundation, Web-Management for International Organisations, Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, Malta, 2003,
Paperback, 40 pages. Summaries of papers presented at the International Conference on Web-Management for International Organisations. Web management practitioners and decision makers in international organisations share their experiences and discuss issues of common interest.
Alan Heil, Voice of America: A History, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 538.
Alan’s detailed and carefully researched “insider’s story” of “the transformation of VOA from a propaganda organ to a respected source of information, from shortwave in World War II to multimedia in the twenty-first century, from a wartime base of relatively few listeners in its first weeks to a global network combining radio, television, and the Internet.”
Stephen Hess and Marvin Kalb, eds. The Media and the War on Terrorism, Brookings Institution, 2003. Publication forthcoming. Current and former government officials and broadcast journalists look at post-9/11 media coverage issues. Contributors include Victoria Clarke, Lawrence Eagleburger, Ted Koppel, Bob Schieffer, Daniel Schorr, and James R. Schlesinger. Co-sponsored with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
Robert D. Kaplan. “Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World,” The Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003, pp. 66-83. Analysis of how the U.S. should operate at a tactical level in managing its “global empire.” Based on Kaplan’s extensive reporting on the role of U.S. Special Forces and his book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, 2001. Kaplan calls for language qualified and media savvy diplomats, more area experts and language specialists inside government, and — as a “strategic imperative” — reinvention of the U.S. Information Agency. (Courtesy of Dell Pendergrast)
Robert D. Kaplan. “The Hard Edge of American Values,” The Atlantic Online. In a lengthy post-publication interview with Elizabeth Shelbourne, Kaplan elaborates on his July/August cover story. “Supremacy by Stealth.” Kaplan elaborates on State’s relevance, State/military relations, the role of the media, and the need to “do information a lot better than we are doing it.”
Pippa Norris. Framing Terrorism: The News Media, Government & the Public, Routlege, 2003. This collection of essays looks at the news framing process and its impact on US foreign and national security policies since 9/11. Contributors include Professors Sean Aday and Kimberly Gross of GWU’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Several chapters are available online. (Courtesy of Donna Oglesby)
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. “U.S. Power and Strategy After Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2003, pp. 60-73. Nye updates key arguments on soft power; US, Iraq, and North Korea policies; and the Bush Administration’s national security strategy with his usual analytical clarity. A convenient summary of central arguments in his The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, 2002.
Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “Managing the Message.”Transcript of Terence Smith’s Media Watch, May 23, 2003. Smith, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, and former Reagan deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver look at how the resignation of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and President Bush’s speech at Mt. Rushmore draw attention to the way the administration projects the president’s image.
Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “Media Crackdown,” Transcript of Terence Smith’s Media Watch, June 1, 2003. Smith discusses the state of Russian media and President Putin’s closure of Russia’s last remaining independent television broadcaster with Ellen Mickiewicz, a Russian media expert from Duke University, and Yevgeny Kiselyov, former general manager of the now defunct TV-6.
Howard Rheingold. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution: Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access, Perseus Publishing, 2002. Internet guru Rheingold looks at how the convergence of mobile communications — cellular phones, personal digital assistants, and wireless-paging and Internet-access devices — is driving political and cultural change from Tokyo to Helsinki to Manhattan to Manila. Updated ideas from the author of The Virtual Community,1993.
Rachel Smolkin. “Media Mood Swings,” American Journalism Review, June 2003. Smolkin looks at the media’s Iraq war coverage. Did “news frames” reflect battle field realities and views of active and retired military officers? Or did the media make premature, fascile judgments?
U.S. Department of State. Recent electronic journals online at State’s International Information Program‘s website.
— “Responses to Human Trafficking,” June, 2003.
— “The Changing Face of U.S. Courts,” May, 2003.
— “The Arts in America: New Directions,” April, 2003.
Upcoming
— “American Internationalism,” July, 2003.
— “Agricultural Biotechnology,” August, 2003.
— “Innovations in Democratic Governance,” September, 2003.
Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. Columbia University and Santa Fe Institute sociologist Duncan Watts analyzes underlying principles of network theory, network structures, and ways in which information spreads (or doesn’t spread) between the nodes of a network — people, neurons, or computers.