Abstract

Abstract This book reviews how news intersects with international politics and discusses the global power and reach of the U.S. news media, especially within the context of the post-9/11 era. It is based on years of interviews conducted between 2009 and 2017, in Kabul, Washington, and New York. The book draws together communications scholarship on hegemony and the U.S. news media’s relationship with American society and the government (i.e. indexing and cascading; agenda-building and agenda-setting; framing; and conflict reportage) along with how national bias and ethnocentrism are fixed phenomena in international news. Given the longevity of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the Afghan news media’s dramatic proliferation since 2001, Afghanistan provides a fascinating case study for the role of journalists in conflict and diplomacy. By identifying, framing, and relaying narratives that affect the normative environment, U.S. correspondents have played unofficial diplomatic and developmental roles. They have negotiated the meaning of war and peace. Indirectly and directly, they have supported Afghan journalists in their professional growth. As a result, these foreign correspondents have not been merely observers to a story; they have been participants in it. The stories they choose to tell, and how they tell them, can become dominant narratives in global politics, and have directly affected events inside Afghanistan. The U.S. journalists did not just provide the first draft of history on this enduring post-9/11 entanglement between the United States and Afghanistan—they actively shaped it.

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