The Global President: International Media and the US Government

The Global President’s findings benefit from a variety of analyses of the tone of foreign coverage, and the book does add nicely to the canon on coverage of the United States in the international media. . . .[T]he project is a worthwhile addition to understanding media coverage and the perception of America abroad, and for that reason alone, it would be helpful for courses in journalism and political science.

Those who continue to accept Fouad Ajami’s oft-quoted claim that Al-Jazeera is ‘a dangerous force’ can profit from reading this analysis of international media coverage of American government during the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. Farnsworth, Lichter, and Schatz use ‘what [they] believe is the largest database of international television news content ever created’ to show why this and other pieces of conventional wisdom about international media’s coverage of the US should be revised. That Al-Jazeera gave even Bush ‘surprisingly favorable coverage’ is only one of the surprises that emerge from the authors’ data analysis. The analysis interrogates both well-established theoretical principles such as that there is an ‘international two-step flow’ of media influence; and popular assumptions such as that sophisticated European media outlets flayed Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign (coverage of Palin was actually ‘far more positive in European media than in the U.S. media’) . . . [T]heir findings are sufficiently arresting to interest any media scholar. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates, all levels; graduate and research collections.