Diplomacy in the New Information Environment

Steven Livingston

For much of the last century, journalists and officials have been partners in a type of ritualistic exchange. Through briefings and press conferences, background interviews, press releases, and other institutionally-based interactions, reporters have usually gleaned information in sufficient quantities to report the news. In turn, officials have usually managed to maintain a measure of control over the direction of international affairs priorities and policies. The relationship has not always been amicable of course, as almost any State Department or embassy spokesperson can testify. But as a rule, and as thirty years of political communication scholarship show, overall policy priorities and objectives have been defined by policymakers. Research has found that institutionally-based descriptions of international affairs have formed the core of news reporting and public debate. As political communication scholars Lance Bennett and Jarol Manheim found in their analysis of news coverage of the First Gulf War, "As a practical matter, news organizations routinely leave policy framing and issue emphasis to political elites (generally, government officials)."

This dynamic is almost certainly in the midst of a fundamental change. Advances in information and communication technologies challenge the dominant position of diplomats in international affairs news. Though still formidable, officials are more likely to find their assertions questioned, their premises challenged, and their objectives scrutinized by the news media and other organizations now empowered by the Internet, wireless telephony, and the information gathering capabilities of space-based satellite systems. "Media access to technology that was once the exclusive domain of governments," writes Robert J. Kurz, "has changed the nature of who knows what and when, thus altering the terms of policy debate."

The new challenges now facing government officials come from two principle sources…

Steven Livingston is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at the University of Washington.