Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton, Dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State, is an ambitious and audacious project. Maxwell writes a sweeping history of American foreign news reporting from the colonial era — when newspaper printers hustled down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming ships — to the multimedia coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He chronicles the technological advances of the printing presses to satellite phones and how these changes have influenced reporting itself. As well, he writes about the cavalcade of colorful personalities whose reporting has shaped how America views the world. Journalism’s Roving Eye is a tome on the evolution of foreign news gathering.
Some very interesting facts emerge from this book: Karl Marx contributed almost five hundred articles on the european scene to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune between 1852 and 1861. This was after Marx had published the Communist Manifesto and was working on Das Kapital. Greeley also employed America’s first female foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller, who reported on the siege of Rome by French forces during the Revolution of 1848.
This comprehensive history deals with all the battles of the newsrooms, the cut-backs on foreign reporting by news executives, what constitutes propaganda, increasingly sophisticated censorship, the future of print media and the problems created by new delivery systems.
In The Dallas Morning News review Philip Seib writes “As Hamilton shows throughout his book, difficulties affecting today’s foreign reporting are nothing new. News executives have always taken advantage of Americans’ insularity by cutting back on foreign coverage (and its costs) whenever possible. The result is a nation possessing vast power and vast ignorance about the rest of the world, a combination certain to create problems for the United States and other nations… . Hamilton’s book should remind people of the richness of foreign reporting, and the value of such journalism in an era when we are all citizens of the world.”
The OPC and the AP Corporate Archives are co-sponsoring this Book Night to be held on Tuesday, November 10 at 6 p.m. at the Associated Press headquarters, 450 West 33 Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), in the Conference Center on the 15th floor. After the lecture by historian and author John Maxwell Hamilton, a panel led by AP Senior Managing Editor John Daniszewski will discuss the future of foreign reporting.
The evening will conclude with a light reception and book signing.
The AP has also agreed to give tours of its five-year-old headquarters and newsroom from 5 to 6 p.m. before the talks. Please RSVP by calling the OPC office at 212-626-9220 or send an e-mail to boots@opcofamerica.org