Reviews

Abstract

Philip Seib's book is just in time. America is waging its war of words on Iraq and policy-makers' decisions are widely discussed in media all over the world. The Global Journalist 'examines journalism as a moral enterprise by exploring the relationship between news and foreign policy' (p. xi). The six chapters of the book address such essential issues as journalistic accuracy, objectivity, sensationalism, responsibility, consistency and longevity in reporting.The book is a 'must read' for journalists, journalism scholars, policy-makers and anyone interested in the issues of world affairs. Philip Seib knows how to merge the voices of journalists, policy-makers and scholars to give a full report on the current situation and problems in global journalism.The author argues that today's wars require a more complex understanding of world affairs than during the Cold War era. More sophisticated and intelligent news coverage should not only include emergency cases, but also the contextual understanding of causes and effects. The end of the Cold War has created new challenges for news organizations and governments. The simplistic classification between 'good guys' and 'bad guys' is not applicable to the 'virtual war', such as the one fought in Kosovo -a 'combat that can be waged without incurring casualties while inflicting precisely targeted destruction on the enemy' (p. 9).The US government's inability to act, and journalists' lack of knowledge about current world affairs, cannot serve as excuses for not covering the misery and sufferings of the world. Instead of being passive processors and followers of state propaganda, the author maintains that journalists should initiate the discussion and tell the truth: 'the government's agenda should not be the news media's agenda, particularly when there exists any evidence that officials are neglecting important matters for reasons of political convenience' (p. 77). Each journalist has the responsibility of knowing what is newsworthy and how to present this information in the most objective and accurate way.Seib suggests that the US, with its superpower status, has a moral obligation to defend the weakest and most unprotected, even if there is not 'a clearly definable American security interest' (pp. 49-50). In Chapters 3 and 4 the author comprehensively explains how the policy-makers and journalists have failed to save thousands of lives in Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, Srebrenica and Sierra Leone. Throughout the book, one of the main underlying questions remains whether 'race affects news priorities' (p. 67). The news coverage from Bosnia and Africa provides