War-time coverage.

Seib, P. (2004). Beyond the front lines: How the news media cover a world shaped by war. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 185 pages.

Palmer, N. (Ed.). (2003). Terrorism, war, and the press. Hollis, NH: Hollis. 316 pages.

It is no surprise that several books focusing on war, terrorism, and the media would appear after the tragedy of September 11,2001, and the Iraq War. These events provide several new chapters in the annals of media's ongoing battle with governments and on the strengths and weaknesses of media coverage during times of crisis.

Phillip Seib's book, Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War is one of the best. Seib, who has had both a distinguished reporting and academic career with several books under his belt, knows just the right balance to strike when interpreting journalistic issues of the day for a broader audience. His book is an impressive assortment of well-researched, well-sourced topics that all merit attention.

Seib talks fluently about the American media's unilateral withdrawal from the scene as world news-gathering organizations, the effects of a continuing news cycle in a cable network and Internet world, the realities of reporting sanitized and preemptive wars, a critique of embedding journalists, Team Pentagon's impressive PR machine, the symbiosis between journalists and the intelligence community, the effects of technology on terrorism and war coverage, the impact of bloggers and Smart-mobbers on mainstream media, cyberterrorism, the growth and impact of Al-Jazeera and other non-Western sources of news, and how media should cover public diplomacy.

In each case, Seib provides sound, journalistic-style coverage and multiple sources to back up his arguments. Seib is consistently critical of the Bush administration's policies in this book, but the work is certainly not a polemic. Seib marshals the evidence carefully and gives attention to both sides of an issue. When he does take a stand, it is a principled, well-documented one.

Seib has judiciously edited himself so that only the most important bits that move the book forward are included. Students will find that each of his topics contains just enough information to illuminate and substantiate but never enough detail to bore or stray to tangents.

Seib's book on coverage of war and terrorism is well suited for upper division courses that concentrate on media criticism or media and society. It touches as many bases as one could possibly hope for with a topical book like this. Students will find the book readable, persuasive, and self-contained and will come away with a much more thoughtful, comprehensive view of how media have or have not responded to the challenges they have faced already in the 21st century. The only ones likely to be disappointed will be graduate students or faculty looking for a deeper treatment of the arguments or a more theoretical orientation.

Terrorism, War, and the Press, edited by Nancy Palmer, Executive Director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard, is a collection of essays that were written previously over the past decade by Fellows of the Shorenstein Center and have been assembled for this volume. Dusting off some old essays and repackaging them would not ordinarily make for a stimulating, cohesive reading; however, this volume has redeeming qualities. It features a good mix of prominent journalists and academics. Because the journalists had the luxury of being in residence when they wrote their pieces, their work is far more extensive and well researched than one would expect. Nick Gowing of the BBC, for example, weighed in with 441 footnotes for his chapter.

A refreshing aspect of this book is that it is truly international in scope and does not assume that terrorism began on September 11th. The situations in Northern Ireland and Israel get just as prominent attention as the internal threats to America. Likewise, the war in Serbia almost gets comparable coverage to the war in Iraq. There is also an insightful essay comparing the response to the World Trade Center bombing by the media in South Asia (India and Pakistan) to that of the United States--an illuminating contrast, indeed. Any time these forgotten parts of the world are put on center stage, American students of media are better for it. Truly, this volume provides a multivoiced, multicultural, multifaceted global perspective on coverage of terrorism and war.

Some of the essays fall into the rut of being myopic journalistic accounts that become quite stale once the initial event reported has passed. Yet, some of the essays transcend their time-based environment to make more far-reaching philosophical and theoretical statements about the state of journalism in America and around the world. One in particular focuses on the motivations to influence media by those who are the underdogs fighting against powerful states, whether these underdogs are protesters, citizens in occupied states, terrorists, revolutionaries, or weaker combatants in state-to-state conflicts. Gadi Wolfsfeld, an Israeli academic, systematically lays out a framework for determining whether the media will play an independent role or be subservient to the powerful party in a dispute between unequal parties. Factors include the powerful antagonist's ability to initiate and control events, their ability to regulate the flow of information, and the degree of political dispute among elites on the powerful party's side. Even though this essay was written more than a decade ago just after the first Gulf War, it certainly rings true in the current environment where unequal conflicts predominate.

Another valuable contribution is a content analysis of coverage of terrorism before September 11th. It shows that the New York Times and Washington Post did indeed devote quite a bit of coverage to terrorism during the years leading up to 2001 and discussed the threat of a direct attack to America but gave far less coverage to terrorism's underlying causes and the frustrations being experienced in the Islamic world. It also shows that heavyweight terrorism coverage in the elite press slowed to a trickle when it filtered down to the local level.

This essay points out that there was considerable activity within the academic community that focused on a variety of angles concerning terrorism and homeland security. Yet journalism did a poor job of discovering and translating those academic findings and perspectives into well-sourced, objective news coverage. Implied in the essay is the need for a new strand of journalism that can tap into this intellectual pipeline and convey substantive information to the public. With news gathering having become so anemic in the international arena, creative initiatives are desperately needed if the news media are to remain global players.

Both of these books make a strong case for shifting resources from news processing to news gathering and for developing alternative news-gathering techniques to offset the appalling shrinkage of global news-gathering capabilities.

Joe Foote (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is the Edward L. Gaylord Chair in the Gaylord College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research interest concerns international media.