War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents

by Mark Pedelty

What are the influences on war correspondents as they report on events in war-torn countries? Mark Pedelty explores the lives, work and culture of the international press corps, examining the institutions, practices, myths, and rituals that shape the work of journalists everywhere. He looks at the context in which journalists construct their reports. By looking at how new stories are actually produced, the author highlights the elusiveness of the goal of "objective" journalism and illustrates how the biases of war correspondents are constrained by the powers of government and how these biases are translated into actual journalistic practices.

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 20, 1995

About the author

Mark Pedelty is an associate professor of Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (1995), Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA (2004), and Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (2012). Dr. Pedelty is currently conducting applied research concerning music as environmental communication.

Reviews

[Nate Hendrix]

I was surprised that I bib not like this book. An anthropologist studied journalists on El Salvador during their civil war. Some people can make anything boring.

[Dan]

I was briefly a freelance correspondent in Central American during the 1980s, and Mark Pedelty gets the truth exactly right -- he should be required reading in every journalism school, and in every course about the third world