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Negotiating in the Press offers a new interpretation of an otherwise
dark moment in American journalism. Rather than emphasize
the familiar story of lost journalistic freedom during World
War I, Joseph R. Hayden describes the press’s newfound
power in the war’s aftermath—that seminal moment
when journalists discovered their ability to help broker peace
talks. He examines the role of the American press at the Paris
Peace Conference of 1919, looking at journalists’ influence
on the peace process and their relationship to heads of state
and other delegation members. Challenging prevailing historical
accounts that assume the press was peripheral to the quest
for peace, Hayden demonstrates that journalists instead played
an integral part in the talks, by serving as “public
ambassadors.”
During the late 1910s, as World War I finally came to a close,
American journalists and diplomats found themselves working
in unlikely proximity, with correspondents occasionally performing
diplomatic duties and diplomats sometimes courting publicity.
The efforts of both groups to facilitate the peace talks at
Versailles arose amidst the vision of a “new diplomacy,”
one characterized by openness, information sharing, and public
accountability. Using evidence from memoirs, official records,
and contemporary periodicals, Hayden reveals that participants
in the Paris Peace Conference continually wrestled with ideas
about the roles of the press and, through the press, the people.
American journalists reported on an abundance of information
in Paris, and negotiators could not resist the useful leverage
that publicity provided. Peacemaking via publicity, a now-obscure
dimension of progressive statecraft, provided a powerful ideological
ethos. It hinted at dynamically altered roles for journalists
and diplomats, offered hope for a world desperate for optimism
and order, and, finally, suggested that the fruits of America’s
great age of reform might be shared with a Europe exhausted
by war.
The peace conference of 1919, Hayden demonstrates, marked
a decisive stage in the history of American journalism, a
coming of age for many news organizations. By detailing what
journalists did before, during, and after the Paris talks,
he tells us a great deal about how the negotiators and the
Wilson administration worked throughout 1919. Ultimately,
he provides a richer integrative view of peacemaking as a
whole.
An engaging analysis of diplomacy and the Fourth Estate,
Negotiating in the Press offers a fascinating look
at how leading nations democratized foreign policy a century
ago and ushered in the dawn of public diplomacy.
A former television news producer, Joseph R. Hayden
teaches journalism at the University of Memphis. He is the
author of two books on presidential-press relations: A
Dubya in the Headlights: President George W. Bush and the
Media and Covering Clinton: The President and the
Press in the 1990s. |
