Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media Since 1945

269 Pages·2003·2.62 MB·English

GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS,
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND
THE MEDIA SINCE 1945
Increasingly commercialised news media organisations play an important part
in the global flow of modern communications. The impact of the media and
their relationship to the international system has scarcely begun to be
appreciated. In Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media
since 1945, Philip Taylor traces the increased involvement of the media in
issues of war and peace. The author analyses the nature, role and influence of
communications within the international arena in the modern world and its
interaction with foreign policy.
Politics, society, culture, the economy and foreign affairs are all now
inseparable from the information created and exchanged on an international
basis. Mass communication and mass media are comparatively recent
phenomena but provide the conditions in which politicians, statesmen and
soldiers have been increasingly forced to operate. Using case studies which
include the Gulf War and Vietnam, Global Communications details
contemporary problems of reportage whilst also providing a comprehensive
historical context. This book offers a study of media in practice rather than in
theory and details the realities of living in an information age.
Global Communications provides an accessible guide to this growing field for
students of communications studies, media studies, international relations and
international history.
Philip Taylor is Reader in International Communications and Deputy
Director, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds.
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES
Edited by Gordon Martel
Professor of History at the University of Northern British
Columbia, and Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort
University.
EXPLAINING AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA
History Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990
R.J.B.Bosworth
IDEOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
IN THE MODERN WORLD
Alan Cassels

Forthcoming:
WAR AND COLD WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Edward Ingram
NORTH EAST ASIA
An International History
John Stephan
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Teddy Uldricks
REVOLUTIONARY ARMIES IN THE
MODERN ERA
S.P.MacKenzie
GLOBAL
COMMUNICATIONS,
INTERNATIONAL
AFFAIRS AND THE
MEDIA SINCE 1945
Philip M.Taylor
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1997 Philip M.Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Taylor, Philip M.
Global communications, international affairs and the media since 1945/
Philip M.Taylor
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Communication, International. 2. Mass media—Political aspects.
3. World politics—1945–
I. Title. II. Series: New international history series.
P96.I5T39 1997
302.2–dc21 97–930
CIP

ISBN 0-203-42962-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-73786-5 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-11678-3 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-11679-1 (pbk)
To Debbie,
for still being here

CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xvii
List of abbreviations and acronyms xix
Introduction—The third wave and the fourth dimension:
communications and the media in the information age 1
Order and disorder in the information age 2
Reinventing wheels 7
The third wave 11
The fourth dimension 20
To have or have not 23
1 International communications and international politics since 1945 27
Drawing the battle-lines of ideological war 28
Extending the conflict to the Third World 37
The real new world information order 47
The new world (dis) order 52
2 Brushfires and firefighters: international affairs and the news media 58
Foreign policy in the mass media age 59
Public opinion and foreign policy 69
Diplomacy and the media 73
Cultural and public diplomacy 77
Television and diplomacy 83
The limits of television in foreign policy 88
Agenda-setting in real time 94
3 Illusions of reality: the media and the reporting of warfare 99
The first flawed rough drafts of history 100
Framing the military-media dynamic 102
The myth of the Vietnam Syndrome 108
Antidotes to the Vietnam Syndrome 115
vii
CONTENTS
Real war and media war 119
Real-time wars: Desert Storm 124
Our wars and other people’s wars 130
Conclusions 139
4 Mind games: information warfare and psychological operations 145
Third-wave warfare 146
Some definitions and operational principles 149
From psywar to PSYOPS 153
Black propaganda versus white 157
Psywar in the Cold War era 164
PSYOPS reborn: Desert Storm 170
Military operations other than war in the nineties 179
Conclusions 189
Conclusion: back to the future 193
Glossary 203
Notes 205
Bibliography 229
Index 242

viii
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
What we now refer to as ‘international’ history was the primary concern of
those whose work is now recognised as the first attempt by Europeans to
conduct a truly ‘historical’ investigation of the past, and it has remained a
central preoccupation of historians ever since. Herodotus, who attempted to
explain the Persian Wars, approached the subject quite differently from his
successor, Thucydides. Herodotus believed that the answers to the questions
that arose from the confrontation between the Persians and the Greeks would
be found in the differences between the two cultures; accordingly, he
examined the traditions, customs and beliefs of the two civilisations. Critics
have long pointed out that he was haphazard in his selection and cavalier in
his use of evidence. The same has never been said of Thucydides, who, in
attempting to explain the Peloponnesian Wars, went about his task more
methodically, and who was meticulous in his use of evidence. Over the next
two thousand years, men like Machiavelli, Ranke and Toynbee have added to
the tradition, but the underlying dichotomy between the ‘anthropological’ and
the ‘archival’ approach has remained. Diplomatic historians have been
condemned as mere archive-grubbers; diplomatic history as consisting of what
one file-clerk said to another. The ‘world-historians’, the synthesisers, have
been attacked for creating structures and patterns that never existed, for
offering explanations that can never be tested against the available evidence.
The aim of ‘The New International History’ is to combine the two
traditions, to bring Herodotus and Thucydides together. While drawing upon
the enormous wealth of archival research conducted by those historians who
continue to work in the political tradition of formal relations between states,
the authors in this series will also draw upon other avenues of investigation
that have become increasingly fruitful since the Second World War. Ideology
and culture, immigration and communications, myths and stereotypes, trade
and finance have come to be regarded by contemporary scholars as elements
essential to a good understanding of international history, and yet, while these
approaches are to be found in detailed monographs and scholarly journals,
ix