United States National Interests in a Changing World by Donald E. Nuechterlein

Author:Donald E. Nuechterlein [Nuechterlein, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, National, Political Science, American Government, Geopolitics, General
ISBN: 9780813112879
Google: 0AQaEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 3447674
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1973-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA

The phrase “power of the press” has long been used in the United States to describe the role of newspapers in shaping decisions on both domestic and foreign policies. However, as Stewart Alsop rightly points out in his book The Center,18 power is often confused with influence. Power refers to the authority to make foreign-policy decisions, which is the role of the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense; the press, particularly the Washington press corps, on the other hand, has great influence on policy-makers in certain instances, but the press does not itself exercise power. This distinction is worth pondering because the apparent frustration of some journalists and editors probably arises from the feeling that they should have greater influence than they do – even to the point of helping to exercise power in the sense of making decisions. George Reedy goes so far as to say that many newspaper stories, and a much higher number of columns, are written “solely for their impact upon the President,” and he observes that “newspapermen are not exempt from the universal urge to shape history.”19

When we talk about the influence of the press and other communications media in the shaping of national interests on any given foreign issue, we can look at the question in terms of the impact the media have on the general public – the way in which reporting of the news causes the public to react positively or negatively to whatever it is that the President wants to do. Obviously, this is important to any discussion of the role of the communications media in the formulation of national interests, as was shown by the nature of the television coverage of the Vietnam War. But the media, and particularly the press, have a more direct impact on the shaping of national interests because the Washington press corps, which Alsop estimates to number about fifteen hundred, is in constant contact with the key policy-makers, and it is in a position to ask embarrassing questions which government leaders might otherwise not be forced to address. James Reston, in his book The Artillery of the Press, recalls that after the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, President Kennedy told the managing editor of the New York Times that he wished the press had disclosed much more of the secret information it had about the planned invasion of Cuba because the reaction of the public might have caused him to cancel the operation.20 George Reedy, who is concerned about presidential blunders in foreign policy because of the President’s growing isolation from the people, observes that the press is one of the few social institutions that “keep a President in touch with reality.” “It is the only force,” he says, “to enter the White House from the outside world with a direct impact upon the man in the Oval Room which cannot be softened by intermediary interpreters or deflected by sympathetic attendants.”21 Reedy believes that the real influence of the press upon

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