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Read an excerpt
from Journalism's Roving Eye (35
pages, 1 MB)
Winner of the 2009 Goldsmith
Award!
Named as one of Slate
Magazine's Best Books of 2009
Watch John Maxwell Hamilton discuss
the role of US foreign reporting on the Riz Khan show
Watch John Maxwell Hamilton discuss
his book on C-SPAN
In all of journalism, nowhere are the stakes higher than
in foreign news-gathering. For media owners, it is the most
difficult type of reporting to finance; for editors, the hardest
to oversee. Correspondents, roaming large swaths of the planet,
must acquire expertise that home-based reporters take for
granted—facility with the local language, for instance,
or an understanding of local cultures. Adding further to the
challenges, they must put news of the world in context for
an audience with little experience and often limited interest
in foreign affairs—a task made all the more daunting
because of the consequence to national security.
In Journalism’s Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton—a
historian and former foreign correspondent—provides
a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news
reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles
the economic and technological advances that have influenced
overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities
who shaped readers’ perceptions of the world across
two centuries.
From the colonial era—when newspaper printers hustled
down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming
ships—to the ongoing multimedia press coverage of the
Iraq War, Hamilton explores journalism’s constant—and
not always successful—efforts at “dishing the
foreign news,” as James Gordon Bennett put it in the
mid-nineteenth century to describe his approach in the New
York Herald. He details the highly partisan coverage
of the French Revolution, the early emergence of “special
correspondents” and the challenges of organizing their
efforts, the profound impact of the non-yellow press in the
run-up to the Spanish-American War, the increasingly sophisticated
machinery of propaganda and censorship that surfaced during
World War I, and the “golden age” of foreign correspondence
during the interwar period, when outlets for foreign news
swelled and a large number of experienced, independent journalists
circled the globe. From the Nazis’ intimidation of reporters
to the ways in which American popular opinion shaped coverage
of Communist revolution and the Vietnam War, Hamilton covers
every aspect of delivering foreign news to American doorsteps.
Along the way, Hamilton singles out a fascinating cast of
characters, among them Victor Lawson, the overlooked proprietor
of the Chicago Daily News, who pioneered the concept
of a foreign news service geared to American interests; Henry
Morton Stanley, one of the first reporters to generate news
on his own with his 1871 expedition to East Africa to “find
Livingstone”; and Jack Belden, a forgotten brooding
figure who exemplified the best in combat reporting. Hamilton
details the experiences of correspondents, editors, owners,
publishers, and network executives, as well as the political
leaders who made the news and the technicians who invented
ways to transmit it. Their stories bring the narrative to
life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable book
for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of foreign
news-gathering.
Amid the steep drop in the number of correspondents stationed
abroad and the recent decline of the newspaper industry, many
fear that foreign reporting will soon no longer exist. But
as Hamilton shows in this magisterial work, traditional correspondence
survives alongside a new type of reporting. Journalism’s
Roving Eye offers a keen understanding of the vicissitudes
in foreign news, an understanding imperative to better seeing
what lies ahead.
John Maxwell Hamilton, whose career spans
journalism and government, has reported from the United States
and abroad for ABC Radio, the Christian Science Monitor,
and other media outlets, in addition to being a longtime commentator
on public radio’s Marketplace. He served in
the Agency for International Development during the Carter
administration, and on the staffs of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee and the World Bank. In the course of his career,
he has had assignments in more than fifty countries in Africa,
Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Hamilton is dean and LSU
Foundation Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor at the Manship School
of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. |
