In all of journalism, nowhere are the stakes higher than in foreign news-gathering. For media owners, it is the most difficult type of reporting to finance; for editors, the hardest to oversee. Correspondents, roaming large swaths of the planet, must acquire expertise that home-based reporters take for granted -- facility with the local language, for instance, or an understanding of local cultures. Adding further to the challenges, they must put news of the world in context for an audience with little experience and often limited interest in foreign affairs -- a task made all the more daunting because of the consequence to national security.

In Journalism's Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton -- a historian and former foreign correspondent -- provides a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers' perceptions of the world across two centuries.

From the colonial era -- when newspaper printers hustled down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming ships -- to the ongoing multimedia press coverage of the Iraq War, Hamilton explores journalism's constant -- and not always successful -- efforts at "dishing the foreign news," as James Gordon Bennett put it in the mid-nineteenth century to describe his approach in the New York Herald. He details the highly partisan coverage of the French Revolution, the early emergence of "special correspondents" and the challenges of organizing their efforts, the profound impact of the non-yellow press in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, the increasingly sophisticated machinery of propaganda and censorship that surfaced during World War I, and the "golden age" of foreign correspondence during the interwar period, when outlets for foreign news swelled and a large number of experienced, independent journalists circled the globe. From the Nazis' intimidation of reporters to the ways in which American popular opinion shaped coverage of Communist revolution and the Vietnam War, Hamilton covers every aspect of delivering foreign news to American doorsteps.

Along the way, Hamilton singles out a fascinating cast of characters, among them Victor Lawson, the overlooked proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, who pioneered the concept of a foreign news service geared to American interests; Henry Morton Stanley, one of the first reporters to generate news on his own with his 1871 expedition to East Africa to "find Livingstone"; and Jack Belden, a forgotten brooding figure who exemplified the best in combat reporting. Hamilton details the experiences of correspondents, editors, owners, publishers, and network executives, as well as the political leaders who made the news and the technicians who invented ways to transmit it. Their stories bring the narrative to life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of foreign news-gathering.

Amid the steep drop in the number of correspondents stationed abroad and the recent decline of the newspaper industry, many fear that foreign reporting will soon no longer exist. But as Hamilton shows in this magisterial work, traditional correspondence survives alongside a new type of reporting. Journalism's Roving Eye offers a keen understanding of the vicissitudes in foreign news, an understanding imperative to better seeing what lies ahead.

In all of journalism, nowhere are the stakes higher than in foreign news-gathering. For media owners, it is the most difficult type of reporting to finance; for editors, the hardest to oversee. Correspondents, roaming large swaths of the planet, must acquire expertise that home-based reporters take for granted -- facility with the local language, for instance, or an understanding of local cultures. Adding further to the challenges, they must put news of the world in context for an audience with little experience and often limited interest in foreign affairs -- a task made all the more daunting because of the consequence to national security.

In Journalism's Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton -- a historian and former foreign correspondent -- provides a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers' perceptions of the world across two centuries.

From the colonial era -- when newspaper printers hustled down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming ships -- to the ongoing multimedia press coverage of the Iraq War, Hamilton explores journalism's constant -- and not always successful -- efforts at "dishing the foreign news," as James Gordon Bennett put it in the mid-nineteenth century to describe his approach in the New York Herald. He details the highly partisan coverage of the French Revolution, the early emergence of "special correspondents" and the challenges of organizing their efforts, the profound impact of the non-yellow press in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, the increasingly sophisticated machinery of propaganda and censorship that surfaced during World War I, and the "golden age" of foreign correspondence during the interwar period, when outlets for foreign news swelled and a large number of experienced, independent journalists circled the globe. From the Nazis' intimidation of reporters to the ways in which American popular opinion shaped coverage of Communist revolution and the Vietnam War, Hamilton covers every aspect of delivering foreign news to American doorsteps.

Along the way, Hamilton singles out a fascinating cast of characters, among them Victor Lawson, the overlooked proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, who pioneered the concept of a foreign news service geared to American interests; Henry Morton Stanley, one of the first reporters to generate news on his own with his 1871 expedition to East Africa to "find Livingstone"; and Jack Belden, a forgotten brooding figure who exemplified the best in combat reporting. Hamilton details the experiences of correspondents, editors, owners, publishers, and network executives, as well as the political leaders who made the news and the technicians who invented ways to transmit it. Their stories bring the narrative to life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of foreign news-gathering.

Amid the steep drop in the number of correspondents stationed abroad and the recent decline of the newspaper industry, many fear that foreign reporting will soon no longer exist. But as Hamilton shows in this magisterial work, traditional correspondence survives alongside a new type of reporting. Journalism's Roving Eye offers a keen understanding of the vicissitudes in foreign news, an understanding imperative to better seeing what lies ahead.

In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain, and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed among his papers in the Library of Congress. With publication of Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and very American voice makes for compelling reading.

Finding the News tells Peter Copeland's fast-paced story of becoming a distinguished journalist. Starting in Chicago as a night police reporter, Copeland went on to work as a war correspondent in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa before covering national politics in Washington, DC, where he rose to be bureau chief of the E. W. Scripps Company. The lessons he learned about accuracy and fairness during his long career are especially relevant today, given widespread concerns about the performance of the media, potential bias, and the proliferation of so-called ""fake news."" He offers an honest and revealing narrative, told with surprising humor, about how he learned the craft of news reporting. Copeland's story begins in 1980, when a colleague hastily declared him a full-fledged reporter after barely four days of training. He went on to learn the business the old-fashioned way: by chasing the news in thirty countries and across five continents. As a young person entering journalism and reporting during some of recent history's most fraught military situations, including Operation Desert Storm and the US invasions of Panama and Somalia, Copeland discovered the craft was his calling. Looking back on his career, Copeland asserts his most important lessons were not about reporting, writing, or the latest technologies, but about the core values that underlie quality journalism: accuracy, fairness, and speed. Replete with behind-the-scenes stories about learning the trade, Copeland's inspiring account builds into a heartfelt defense of journalism ""done the right way"" and serves as a call to action for today's reporters. The values he learned as a cub reporter are needed now more than ever, he argues, as the integrity and motives of even seasoned journalists are called into question by political partisans. Copeland admits that those critics are not entirely wrong but contends that exciting new technologies, combined with a return to old-school news values, could usher in a golden age of journalism.

Whether used as a political tactic to discredit news stories and media outlets, or as a description of false information manufactured and circulated for profit, the term ""fake news"" holds a particularly caustic sway in twenty-first-century society. A frequent subject of cable news broadcasts, periodical coverage, and social media chatter, and a constant talking point for political pundits, its impact spans from shaping minor differences in partisanship to influencing elections. In Fake News! Josh Grimm gathers a range of critical approaches to provide an essential resource for readers, students, and teachers interested in understanding this ever-present feature of today's media and political landscape. The opening section surveys the long history of fake news, with examples ranging from seventeenth-century satires of early newspapers to propaganda efforts in Nazi Germany, and then traces the evolution of the term over time. The following section explores how exposure to fake news impacts individuals, with particular emphasis on changes in popular discourse and the ability to assess sources critically. Essays in this section also highlight approaches developed by newsrooms and other organisations, including Facebook and Google, to fight the widespread dissemination of fake news. The volume pairs original research with articles from prominent scholarly journals, offering a wide-ranging and accessible discussion of debates central to the current post-truth era, covering topics such as social media, the Onion, InfoWars, media literacy, and the radicalization of white men. By highlighting key components and practical methods for examining misinformation in the media, Fake News! presents in-depth analysis of a topic that remains more timely than ever.

Once considered the "best American newspaperman London has ever had," Edward Price Bell (1869--1943) helped invent the ideal of a professional foreign news service at the late and great Chicago Daily News, which in its heyday had the second-largest daily newspaper circulation in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, professional overseas reporting was still an experiment. The Chicago Daily News's visionary owner and publisher Victor Lawson was not certain how to organize the service or even what kind of news it should cover. Bell, who had distinguished himself as a young reporter in Chicago, became the anchor for the service when Lawson sent him to London in 1900. The course he set established the standard for the New York Times and other prestigious American newspapers. Unfortunately, few journalists or scholars are familiar with Bell's contributions, in part because his autobiography remained archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In Journalism of the Highest Realm, Jaci Cole and John Maxwell Hamilton have edited and annotated Bell's story, focusing on his lively account of the early days of the Chicago Daily News's foreign service as well as the dramatic stories his correspondents covered. James F. Hoge, Jr., the last editor-in-chief of the Chicago Daily News and present editor of Foreign Affairs, sets the stage for Bell's memoir with an informative foreword on the evolution of foreign news gathering over the last century.

A bright-eyed midwestern teenager who learned journalism on the job at a small newspaper in Terre Haute, Indiana, Bell quickly established himself as an enterprising reporter. Moving on to Chicago, he became the Daily News's go-to man. He was assigned big stories and landed interviews with leading politicians, a knack that became a trademark of his overseas reporting. Over more than two decades in London, Bell entrenched himself in politics and culture, sending back thoughtful background and analysis of current events. In his memoir, Bell recounts his exclusive wartime interviews with Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, and Lord Richard Haldane, the minister of war; a later sit-down with the charismatic Il Duce, Benito Mussolini; and his rather tense exchanges with former vice president Charles Dawes, American ambassador to Britain.

The respect Bell commanded among British elites and his years of experience as a London insider thrust him into a diplomatic role. Bell became an unofficial envoy to the British government and also a conduit for British views to the United States and its leaders. After Bell returned to Chicago in the early 1920s, the Daily News dispatched him on special missions to Europe and Asia to interview leaders about world peace. His accounts were published in two books and earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1930s. Despite this acclaim -- indeed, to some extent because of it -- Bell fell out of favor when new owners acquired the newspaper in 1931, and he retired to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.With Journalism of the Highest Realm Cole and Hamilton put this great newspaperman into a broader context. As they show in their thoughtful introduction, Bell and the Daily News continually grappled with problems that still bedevil overseas correspondence. Foreign news, they show, has always been an enterprise that is at once valuable and vulnerable.

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's bestselling comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible -- they swear by it. But few readers are acquainted with Waugh's memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. Waugh in Abyssinia is an entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter that "provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini's imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh's famous satire." In the forward, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores in how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which real-life events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh's overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man (a misfit), in the right place (a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination), at the right time (when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get.) The result, Waugh in Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other.

At the height of World War I, in the winter of 1917--1918, one of the Progressive era's most successful muckracking journalists, Ray Stannard Baker (1870--1946), set out on a special mission to Europe on behalf of the Wilson administration. While posing as a foreign correspondent for the New Republic and the New York World, Baker assessed public opinion in Europe about the war and postwar settlement. American officials in the White House and State Department held Baker's wide-ranging, trenchant reports in high regard. After the war, Baker remained in government service as the president's press secretary at the Paris Peace Conference, where the Allied victors dictated the peace terms to the defeated Central Powers. Baker's position gave him an extraordinary vantage point from which to view history in the making. He kept a voluminous diary of his service to the president, beginning with his voyage to Europe and lasting through his time as press secretary. Unlike Baker's published books about Wilson, leavened by much reflection, his diary allows modern readers unfiltered impressions of key moments in history by a thoughtful inside observer.

Published here for the first time, this long-neglected source includes an introduction by John Maxwell Hamilton and Robert Mann that places Baker and his diary into historical context.

On May 7, 1945, Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy became the most famous -- or infamous -- American correspondent of World War II. On that day in France, General Alfred Jodl signed the official documents as the Germans surrendered to the Allies. Army officials allowed a select number of reporters, including Kennedy, to witness this historic moment -- but then instructed the journalists that the story was under military embargo. In a courageous but costly move, Kennedy defied the military embargo and broke the news of the Allied victory. His scoop generated instant controversy. Rival news organizations angrily protested, and the AP fired him several months after the war ended.

In this absorbing and previously unpublished personal account, Kennedy recounts his career as a newspaperman from his early days as a stringer in Paris to the aftermath of his dismissal from the AP. During his time as a foreign correspondent, he covered the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, unrest in Greece, and ethnic feuding in the Balkans. During World War II, he reported from Greece, Italy, North Africa, and the Middle East before heading back to France to cover its liberation and the German surrender negotiations. His decision to break the news of V-E Day made him front-page headlines in the New York Times. In his narrative, Kennedy emerges both as a reporter with an eye for a good story and an unwavering foe of censorship.

This edition includes an introduction by Tom Curley and John Maxwell Hamilton, as well as a prologue and epilogue by Kennedy's daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran. Their work draws upon newly available records held in the Associated Press Corporate Archives.

Everyone knows which books people buy; they can just look at the best-seller lists. But who knows which books people steal? Who, for that matter, knows that authors ruin the book market by writing too much? Or why book critics are not critical? Or why librarians need to throw out more books? Who, indeed, knows the answer to that all important question in our democracy: should presidents and presidential candidates write books? (The answer is no.)

In this irreverent analysis of the book industry, John Maxwell Hamilton -- a longtime journalist and public radio commentator -- answers these questions and many more, proving that the best way to study books is not to take them too seriously. He provides a rich history of the book -- from the days when monks laboriously hand-copied texts to the recent tidal wave of Titanic tie-ins -- and gives a succinct overview of the state of the industry today, including writing, marketing, promoting, reviewing, ghost-writing, and collecting.

Throughout, Hamilton peppers his prose with spicy tidbits of information that will fascinate bibliophiles everywhere. For instance, did you know that Walt Whitman was fired from a government job because his boss found Leaves of Grass, and its author, immoral? Or that the most stolen books in the United States are the Bible, followed by The Joy of Sex? How about that Dan Quayle's 1989 Christmas card read "May our nation continue to be a beakon of hope to the world?" Or that Casanova was an ardent lover of books as well as women?

Hamilton offers an inside look at the history and business of book reviewing, explaining why, more often than not, reviewers resemble "counselors at a self-esteem camp" and examining theenormous impact of the "Oprah effect" on the market. As the self-appointed Emily Post of the book world, he advises publishers, authors, and readers on proper etiquette for everything from book parties ("Feel free to build a party around a theme in a book, no matter how tacky") and jacket photos ("You should not show off your new baby unless [your] book [is] about raising kids"), to book signings ("Just because an author has given you an autograph does not mean they want to become your pen pal") and promotion by friends and relatives ("They should carry the book at all times on public transportation with the cover showing").

Both edifying and enjoyable, Casanova Was a Book Lover fills a Grand Canyon -- sized void in the literature on literature. It is indispensable for book enthusiasts who want to know the naked truth about reading, writing, and publishing.

In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain, and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed among his papers in the Library of Congress. With publication of Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and very American voice makes for compelling reading.

Manipulating the Masses tells the story of the enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. During the Great War, the federal government exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of American citizens. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), established by President Woodrow Wilson one week after the United States entered the war in April 1917. Driven by its fiery chief, George Creel, the CPI reached every crevice of the nation, every day, and extended widely abroad. It established the first national newspaper, made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing, and pioneered the concept of public diplomacy. It spread the Wilson administration's messages through articles, cartoons, books, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through feature films and volunteer Four Minute Men who spoke during intermission; through posters plastered on buildings and along highways; and through pamphlets distributed by the millions. It enlisted the nation's leading progressive journalists, advertising executives, and artists. It harnessed American universities and their professors to create propaganda and add legitimacy to its mission. Even as Creel insisted that the CPI was a conduit for reliable, fact-based information, the office regularly sanitized news, distorted facts, and played on emotions. Creel extolled transparency but established front organizations. Overseas, the CPI secretly subsidized news organs and bribed journalists. At home, it challenged the loyalty of those who occasionally questioned its tactics. Working closely with federal intelligence agencies eager to sniff out subversives and stifle dissent, the CPI was an accomplice to the Wilson administration's trampling of civil liberties. Until now, the full story of the CPI has never been told. John Maxwell Hamilton consulted over 150 archival collections in the United States and Europe to write this revealing history, which shows the shortcuts to open, honest debate that even well-meaning propagandists take to bend others to their views. Every element of contemporary government propaganda has antecedents in the CPI. It is the ideal vehicle for understanding the rise of propaganda, its methods of operation, and the threat it poses to democracy.