Part One

Part One:
How U.S. Television Coverage of World Affairs
Has Changed


The launching of Telstar, the first communications satellite, in 1962, provides a fitting metaphor for the beginning of the period during which Americans turned to television as their most important news source and in which U.S. networks radically increased the amount, quality, and intimacy of their international news coverage -- apt because the satellite did so much to bring the world into the American living room.

The American of 1962 who used television as a primary source of news on foreign affairs could not have been very satisfied. A poll taken around that time found that only 29% of Americans considered television the most credible news source available. More than print or radio, television news -- especially as practiced with the more and more vivid and dramatic techniques of the 1970s and 1980s -- provoked an intense and often passionate reaction to foreign issues. This and the increasing prevalence of foreign coverage had much to do with the fact that Americans of the late 1970s and 1980s were probably more animated by foreign issues than they had ever been before in peacetime.

At no time has this been more true than at moments of foreign challenge. During the past thirty years, presidents have increasingly had to hone their skills in dealing with television during foreign crises, operating in an environment that became very different from that of 1962.