Covering the World with the International Herald Tribune

This dissertation provides an institutional history of the International Herald Tribune, the most prominent international newspaper from the 1960s until the 2000s, and a social history of the American journalists who produced it. As a publication that took advantage of telecommunications advances to print remotely beginning in the 1970s, it was a rare print newspaper to achieve international distribution before the internet era. The IHT drew on the resources of its two parent publications, the Washington Post and the New York Times, to produce a daily newspaper for a global elite readership at a time when those newspapers were transforming American journalism through their coverage of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate. This dissertation provides a transnational account of American journalism as a constituent part of American market empire by tracing the evolutions that the IHT underwent from the end of Marshall Plan attempts to use it as a tool of American soft power, through technological and neoliberal transformations, up to the end of the Cold War and the digital revolution. It details the constellation of technological, political, social, and cultural forces that allowed the IHT’s distribution to expand from France to cover the entire world. It examines the implications of a global readership and follows key developments in American journalism and geopolitics from the decentered perspective of American journalists in Paris. Concluding with the digital transition, it shows that the IHT was incapable of transferring its print era success to a new paradigm because of its hybrid corporate structure, born out of a unique mid-century conjuncture of American media consolidation and Cold War geopolitics.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Schaefer, Christopher

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Preston, Andrew

• American Empire
• American Journalism
• Deindustrialization
• Digital Revolution
• Globalization
• International Herald Tribune
• Transnational Elites

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.95328

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/347911