Social Construction of International News

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.

PHILO C. WASBURN is Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. He is the author of Political Sociology: Approaches, Concepts, Hypotheses and Broadcast Propaganda: International Radio Broadcasting and the Construction of Political Reality (Praeger, 1992).