Media and the Politics of Failure: Great Powers, Communication Strategies, and Military Defeats [Paperback]

Roselle analyzes how political leaders of powerful states use media to explain military defeats. The cases of the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan highlight the role of great power identity, domestic politics, and media structure.Political Communication and Policy Legitimacy: Explaining Failure War-Waging and Reassessment: Vietnam Withdrawal and Aftermath: Vietnam War-Waging and Reassessment: Afghanistan Withdrawal and Aftermath: Afghanistan Conclusions and a Post-Cold War Assessment

'This is a great little text. It is original, concisely written, packs a lot of argument and data into just 190 pages, and draws on some unusual primary sources.' - Media, War, & Conflict

'In this fascinating study, Laura Roselle compares how political leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union developed a media strategy to minimize or camouflage the failure of their war policies. She does this through extensive comparative content analysis, archival work, high-level interviews, and a thorough mining of the literature on both sides regarding the American withdrawal from Vietnam and the Soviet exit from Afghanistan. Though the structures and practices of the two media systems could not have been more different, Roselle's work breaks new ground with solid evidence of how the two nations' dilemmas resembled each other in multiple ways.' - Ellen Mickiewicz, James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy Studies and Director, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University

'What happens to powerful nations when they lose wars? Although Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan remain painful failures in the national psyches of the U.S. and Russia, virtually no research has been done to compare these experiences. Laura Roselle has provided a unique and insightful comparison of how two political Leviathans attempted to control information flow about unsulã)