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Over recent years media history has attracted increasing attention among scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the question of American influence lingers in most of the recently published works on European media history. As transmitters of 'soft power', the mass media sit at the centre of current globalization/Americanization debates, and yet the media dimension in transatlantic relations has suffered from a surprising degree of neglect, as the editors of this stimulating volume point out. Only Jeremy Turnstall's classic study, The media are American (1977), with its telling subtitle 'Anglo-American media in the world', emphasized the heavy British involvement in what is commonly regarded as American global media dominance. Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton have now brought together a useful collection of fourteen essays that examine the institutional and personal connections, and cultural borrowings, among British and American media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The book is organized into four thematic sections. Part i compares explicitly British and US media practice, revealing a significant degree of commonalities. Richard Fulton's analysis of war coverage during the Spanish-American and Sudan Wars of 1898 emphasizes that 'the discourse of American and British war correspondents was virtually indistinguishable' (p. 13). Sensationalism was a defining element of war coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, but utilized in different nationalist frameworks: reports from Santiago that appeared in the American quality press were far more sensational than those that appeared in their British counterparts; conversely, the sensationalist elements in reports from Sudan that appeared in the British press were mostly edited out in the United States. Matt McIntire compares late nineteenth-century press coverage of baseball and cricket. In both countries, the press helped these sports become an increasingly important part of leisure culture, and argued that baseball and cricket were significant to their respective cultures. Joel H. Wiener contributes a stimulating piece explaining why speed was a more persistent element in America than in Britain,...