Description:
Winner of the Goldsmith Prize, the Tankard Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association's Book of the Year, John Maxwell Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye has quickly become the definitive history of American foreign reporting. This updated edition includes a new preface and updated text that reflects the most current developments in foreign reporting. Beginning with the colonial era, the book focuses on underlying factors -- such as technology and public opinion -- as well as a cavalcade of personalities who bring the narrative to life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable resource for anyone eager to understand the evolution of foreign news-gathering.
Brief description: John Maxwell Hamilton, a former journalist and government official, is the Hopkins P. Breazeale LSU Foundation Professor of Journalism in the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He has authored or edited many books, including Journalism's Roving Eye and Manipulating the Masses, both of which won the Goldsmith Book Prize.
Review Quotes:
"Journalism's Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton... spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. The book, in its scope, detail, and sheer mastery, is a major achievement. -- James Boylan, Columbia Journalism Review
"Not just for journalism hounds, Journalism's Roving Eye ladles from the last two and a half centuries a detailed history of American reporting from abroad. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine -- the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet -- to produce an authoritative book. There is nothing like it in the library." -- Slate Magazine
"Journalism's Roving Eye is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering--foreign correspondence--that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now." -- Foreign Affairs
"Journalism's Roving Eye is a remarkable achievement and deserves to be ranked as the definitive history of American news coverage of the rest of the world. [It] should remind people of the richness of foreign reporting and the value of such journalism in an era where we are all citizens of the world." -- Dallas Morning News
"This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence." -- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication