Lights, camera, war : is media technology driving international politics /

Neuman (a university educator and journalist) examines the relationships between ever-changing media technology and the conduct of international affairs. Engaging discussions of these relationships from the advent of the telegraph to cyberspace constitute the bulk of the book. The central analytical focus is posed in the work's subtitle. The author responds to the question by arguing that although technological developments for more than half a millennium have had enormous impact on the exercise of war and diplomacy, the crucial and decisive factor for the successful conduct of international relations has been and remains strong and effective political leadership. All levels. P. Watanabe; University of Massachusetts at Boston

USA Today foreign editor Neuman supplies a historical perspective for current concerns that new technology is making fundamental changes in international relations and in journalism's coverage of diplomacy. Certainly CNN's satellite access to videotape from around the world increases the pace of diplomatic developments, but so did the printing press, the telegraph, photography, the telephone, radio, film, and television. Each technological breakthrough placed new demands on political leaders, diplomats, and journalists, and each was simultaneously hailed by proponents as empowering ordinary citizens and attacked by others as a step toward mob rule. Neuman examines this history, from the Civil War through the Gulf War and Bosnia, pointing out that, in each generation, effective leaders (including generals as well as diplomats) have learned how to use new technologies to accomplish their purposes: "for all the upheaval produced by each new invention . . . individual skills of leadership in the selling of public policy matter more." A thoughtful contrarian analysis of media technologies' impact. --Mary Carroll

The Gulf War was the first satellite-TV war, where viewers at home knew who was winning before the soldiers in the field did. The effects of satellite TV on world affairs may concern many, but not Neuman, foreign editor of USA Today, who writes that it ``is a major check on government control of information'' and, therefore, a major blow in favor of the people's right to know. Neuman shows how the satellite compares with other inventions that changed history. First she looks at how the invention of the printing press helped fuel Martin Luther's religious revolution. She finds that Samuel F.B. Morse's development of the telegraph caused even more trauma than the power of satellite TV, because for the first time it brought events immediately to the people. She relates how the telegraph was used by journalists in the Civil War and how it fanned the Spanish-American War frenzy; the effect of the Zimmermann telegram on the U.S. entry into WWI; how Edward R. Murrow brought WWII ``home'' via radio; and how JFK used the ``slowness'' of television (as compared to the swiftness of satellites) to deliberate during the Cuban missile crisis. Neuman's march through communication history is informative, a consummate study of the effect of communication on world events. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

For more than 500 years politicians and diplomats-and those who reported their actions and words-have viewed with alarm almost every aspect of technology's advances: printing, telegraphy, photography, the telephone, film, radio, TV and its satellite transmission, and now the vast flow of knowledge in cyberspace. Neuman, foreign editor of USA Today and coauthor of the political mystery Knight and Day (LJ 5/1/95), agrees that each technological advance has sped up the processes of political leadership, diplomacy, and journalism. But her research has brought her to the conclusion that technology advances have not hampered good political leadership, good diplomacy, or good journalism nor, for that matter, the bad practitioners of those "arts." In sum, with apologies to Marshall McLuhan, technology is not the message. Recommended for international affairs, media, and technology collections.-Chet Hagan, Berks Cty. P.L. System, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Neuman, foreign editor of USA Today, claims to debunk myths about the power of technology to shape world events. The author wants it both ways. She documents the influence that radical new developments in communications technology have had in shaping world affairs, and then insists that nothing has really changed, because leadership always survives preeminent. ""There are great truths in the history of media technology,"" Neuman proclaims portentously, ""not the least of them that for all the upheaval produced by each invention . . . individual skills of leadership in the selling of public policy matter more."" But there is a troubling circularity to her arguments that the more things change the more they remain the same. Each chapter documents the revolution wrought by some new media technology, from Gutenberg's printing press to photography to the telegraph, the telephone, and CNN. In each case, Neuman argues, those leaders have won out who have learned to harness the new technology and turn it to their own ends. Martin Luther's skillful use of the printing press helped trigger the Reformation, for example, and Hitler and Lenin used cinema as propaganda to help consolidate their power. But even as Neuman claims to downplay the power of the media, she builds it up. It would seem to follow from her arguments that the leaders we get--those who use media so skillfully--are not necessarily the leaders we would have without technology. In other words, we get the leaders, for better and for worse, whom technology sticks us with. Some political analysts, Plato among them, have considered other skills essential to leadership besides an ability to manipulate the latest media technology. Neuman's book is interesting as a historical review but superficial as political analysis because of its failure to consider fundamental questions of the relationship of the media to society. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.