Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Wasburn compares U.S. commercial news reports on a wide variety of events with those produced by the news media of several other nations. The events include the Falklands War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Tiananmen Square Uprising, several political assassinations, major trade disputes between the U.S. and Japan, the Intifada , U.S. presidential nominating conventions and a presidential inauguration.

Different patterns of coverage--amount of attention given an event, language used to describe an event, selection of particular occurrences to characterize an event, and descriptions of U.S. and international public opinion of the event--are shown to reflect different political, economic, and strategic interests of nations, historical contexts in which news was constructed, national differences in values that influence the production of news, and differences in historically specific relations between news media and the governments of their countries. Attention is given to contrasts between the national image of the United States constructed by U.S. commercial news media and the images of the United States produced by various foreign news media. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with political communication, journalism, political science, and political sociology.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Series Foreword (p. xiii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part I What Our News Media Say (p. 5)
• Chapter 1 We're Talking about Us: the Social Construction of the United States by America's Commercial News Media (p. 7)
• Chapter 2 We're Talking about Them: U.S. News Media Construction of Wars between Other Nations (p. 23)
• Chapter 3 We're Talking about Them: U.S. News Media Construction of Other Nations' Internal Wars and Assassinations (p. 47)
• Part II What Their News Media Say: Four Case Studies (p. 71)
• Chapter 4 The United States as a Former Enemy: Russian National Television Construction of the United States after the Collapse of the Soviet Union (p. 73)
• Chapter 5 The United States as a World Military Power: an Indonesian Newspaper's View of the United States in the Persian Gulf Crisis (p. 93)
• Chapter 6 The United States as a World Economic Power: Radio Japan's View of the United States in International Trade Disputes (p. 109)
• Chapter 7 The United States as a Friend-At-A-Distance: Views of the 1996 Presidential Nominating Conventions and the Presidential Inauguration on British, Canadian, and French Television (p. 127)
• Part III Implications (p. 151)
• Chapter 8 Reassessing Our News Media and Our Understanding of Others and Ourselves (p. 153)
• References (p. 165)
• Author Index (p. 175)
• Subject Index (p. 179)
• About the Author (p. 185)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Academics and other serious consumers of international news will find this discourse-centered analysis of journalistic practice very rewarding. The most important organizing concept in the book is that of the symbolic universe--an unexamined, uncontested, and taken-for-granted vision of the basic moral values and historical narratives that define the identities and presumed motivations of nations and their leaders, thereby explaining the meanings of newsworthy events. This basic framework of interpretation is conveyed in the media by word choices and topic selections that seem entirely natural to readers and journalists alike. The power of symbolic universes is especially clear in international news, and Wasburn's concise, highly readable case studies trace it in national media coverage of wars between other nations, wars in which the media's own nation is involved, and internal wars and political assassinations in other nations. Wasburn (sociology, Purdue Univ.) includes analyses of media in the US, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, Canada, the UK, and France, and he is able to explore the nuances of media participation in the construction of international relationships that vary from that of outright enemies to trade adversaries to wary friends. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers and upper-division undergraduates and above. A. Arno University of Hawaii at Manoa