In the most comprehensive study of the media and foreign policy, twenty distinguished scholars and analysts explain the role played by the mass media and public opinion in the development of United States foreign policy in the Gulf War.

Tracing the flow of news, public opinion, and policy decisions from Sadam Hussein's rise to power in 1979, to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, through the outbreak and conclusion of the war, the contributors look at how the media have become key players in the foreign policy process. They examine the pre-war media debate, news coverage during and after the war, how the news-gathering process shaped the content of the coverage, and the media's effect on public opinion and decision makers. We see what goes on behind the scenes in the high tech world of political communication, and are confronted by troubling questions about the ways the government managed coverage of the war and captured journalists at their own news game.

Taken by Storm also examines more general patterns in post-Cold war journalism and foreign policy, particularly how contemporary journalistic practices determine whose voices and what views are heard in foreign policy coverage. At stake are the reactions of a vast media audience and the decision of government officials who see both the press and the public and key elements of the policy game.

The first book to fully integrate our understanding of the news business, public opinion, and government action, Taken by Storm transcends the limits of the Gulf War to illuminate the complex relationship between the media, the public, and U.S. foreign policy in the late twentieth century.

This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan’s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan’s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan’s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.

Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles, Transnational Sport tells how sports shape experiences of global Koreanness, and how those experiences are affected by national cultures. Rachael Miyung Joo focuses on superstar Korean athletes and sporting events produced for transnational media consumption. She explains how Korean athletes who achieve success on the world stage represent a powerful, globalized Korea for Koreans within the country and those in the diaspora. Celebrity Korean women athletes are highly visible in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the media, these young golfers are represented as daughters to be protected within the patriarchal Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women with commercial appeal. Meanwhile, the hard-muscled bodies of male athletes, such as Korean baseball and soccer players, symbolize Korean masculine dominance in the global capitalist arena. Turning from particular athletes to a mega-event, Joo discusses the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, a watershed moment in recent Korean history. New ideas of global Koreanness coalesced around this momentous event. Women and youth assumed newly prominent roles in Korean culture, and, Joo suggests, new models of public culture emerged as thousands of individuals were joined by a shared purpose.