Resolved: 1) that the foreign news most Americans receive is sadly deficient in both its quality and quantity; and, 2) that the international reporting we do get -- in this satellite era of media technology -- often has a negative effect on foreign policy because it's distributed with precipitate, mindless speed and thus undermines traditional diplomacy.

 That's a debating premise hashed out in two new books: one that examines who the foreign correspondents are and how well they do their jobs; and one that worries the question of how instantaneous, satellite-driven journalism may be creating emotional, half-baked public opinion and, as a result, forcing diplomats to improvise policy with undue haste.

 First, the foreign correspondents. Since 1981 Stephen Hess has been turning out books about the interaction of journalism and government. International News & Foreign Correspondents is the fifth in that series, and is based mostly on a content analysis of 24,000 newspaper, wire service, newsmagazine, and television stories with a foreign dateline, plus a survey of 404 foreign correspondents and visits to overseas news posts and foreign news desks. Among his conclusions:

 ¥ Americans are "increasingly ill-informed" about international affairs.

 ¥ Most newspapers, even in large cities, give miserly coverage to international news that doesn't involve Americans either as troops or hostages.

 ¥ No country (of the world's 180 or so) except possibly Russia gets TV coverage sufficient to afford viewers a coherent notion of what's going on there.

 ¥ Violent images mark 50 percent of television's foreign news stories.

 ¥ International news is too often reported by "parachutists," reporters who race helter-skelter to crisis spots and affect a knowledgeability they don't have.

 Far too much foreign reporting is merely anecdotal, Hess argues: the brilliant spotlight of journalism's intense interest briefly illuminates a trouble spot and then scurries on impatiently to the next. Example: during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired 357 stories on China -- more than they'd done in the entire decade from 1972 (when China opened to the West) to 1981. Then suddenly, China reportage dropped from 14.6 percent of foreign dateline stories in 1989 to 1.4 percent in 1990.

During one period (1988-1992), roughly one-tenth of the world's countries received four-fifths of American TV coverage, with the Soviet Union or Russia getting the heftiest share for the obvious reason that the collapse of communism is by far the biggest foreign news story of the generation. But right behind the Soviet Union/Russia comes Israel, with a land mass about the size of Delaware and a population comparable to greater Chicago's. How come it commands so much of our attention? A National Public Radio correspondent pointed out that "much of a foreign reporter's work is crisis coverage" and Israel has had little else but crisis since its founding. Also: it has English-language newspapers and news programs, and official press releases are in English as well as Hebrew. And the democratic government -- always eager for the good will of Americans -- is more hospitable to journalists than its neighboring states. A former head of Israel's Government Press Office opined that if there weren't three million Jews iNew York, the agenda-setting New York Times would publish less about Israel, and the region's magnetism for all journalists would shrink accordingly. But Hess's data contradict that notion: during the survey period, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and Time gave a higher percentage of their international stories to Israel than The New York Times did.

 No, it's the prospect of mayhem, bombings, gun battles, mortar attacks, and civil strife that traditionally have attracted both print and electronic journalists like kids to a ballpark. In 1988-92 (a period that included the Persian Gulf war), almost a third of all network stories involved combat, and -- along with related reports on human rights, accident/disaster, and crime -- more than half of all foreign reports on television related to violence. Nothing terribly new about that. Thirty years ago this summer, deep in the Vietnam rain forest, I asked a network correspondent why the near-totality of TV's coverage of the war consisted of combat coverage at the expense of thoughtful, analytical consideration of the underlying issues. He explained, impatiently, that he'd surely receive (what he called) "a rocket from New York" if he missed an action-filled firefight that competing networks had on the air -- no matter that such pitched battles had minimal long-term military significance, and zero effect on viewersability to learn what the war was all about. "New York wants John Wayne movies," said the correspondent, "not talking heads."

 Part of Hess's book describes the atmospherics and demographics of foreign corresponding. By 1992, 82 percent of reporters posted abroad were college graduates (up from 74 percent ten years earlier) and 11 percent had graduate degrees. More and more women -- in the footsteps of Dorothy Thompson, Martha Gellhorn, Margaret Bourke-White, Marguerite Higgins, and Gloria Emerson -- are getting foreign assignments. And the current hottest property on the foreign beat is Christiane Amanpour of CNN and 60 Minutes. Of 185 foreign correspondents in the survey who worked abroad before 1970, only twelve were women. That ratio now stands at just two to one in favor of males. Minorities are not doing as well. Fully 92 percent of foreign correspondents are white, and -- remarkably -- that includes local hires in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Correspondents take their spouses along on 92 percent of their postings, but divorce is still the occupational hazard of the profession. Most younger foreign correspondents tend to have greater language proficiency than their predecessors. They're a far cry from a veteran correspondent of my acquaintance who spent years abroad in a dozen countries and spoke only English. "If a foreigner doesn't understand what I say, I just say it louder," he explained. "It seems to work." In spite of the hazards to life, limb, and domestic tranquility, foreign corresponding has a perk among its rewards that keeps many a newsperson happily overseas: the first $70,000 of earned income is exempt from U.S. iome taxes.

 But the irrefutable fact is that most Americans simply aren't interested in news from abroad except for stories with a strong American ingredient. One poll of newspaper managing editors rated foreign news fifth out of seven categories in reader interest. Newsmagazines sporting cover stories about foreign events sell significantly fewer copies than their average. The broadcast networks have far fewer foreign bureaus than they had twenty years ago; indeed, CNN -- with its smaller audience and its need to fill twenty-four hours of every day with news -- has as many reporters stationed outside the U.S. as ABC, CBS, and NBC combined. Hess reports that three-quarters of the nation's largest one hundred newspapers have no full-time foreign correspondents at all. Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, laments that foreign coverage "will not bring in a single page of advertising."

 The best strategy for being well-informed about the state of the world, Hess suggests, is to move to a large city having a first-rank newspaper.

 Hess's book intersects lightly at one juncture with that of Johanna Neuman, who serves as foreign editor of USA Today. Hess quotes William Greider describing USA Today (in his 1992 book Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy) as a newspaper with "a foreign editor but no foreign correspondents." (It now has one.) That jibe aside, Lights, Camera, War is a useful tour d'horizon of how media technology evolved through the years and how it influences the formation of public policy. Chronologically, what's under review is the printing press, the telegraph, still photography, the telephone, newsreels, radio, television, satellites, and cyberspace. The author is at great pains to defend, not always persuasively, the premise that, yes, shifts in international relations "brought by the satellite and the computer, by digital technology and global networks, by CNN and real-time television, are profound." But there's nothing much new about such changes (she argues) because every generation of diplomat and politician has adapted to freshly minted media, and leaders with spine and imagination have always found ways of operating in whatever new media environment happens to be emerging. Having got that bit of contrariness off her chest, Neuman settles down and gives us a well-researched primer on media history.

 Time was when news and diplomatic messages could travel only at the speed of transportation: trains, sailing ships, horses. With the invention of the telegraph, they moved at the speed of light: 186,000 miles per second. In 1889, the London Spectator beat Marshall McLuhan to the punch when it lamented the telegraph's impact on journalism and international relations: "The world is for purposes of intelligence reduced to a village. All men are compelled to think of all things at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection." Nobody has improved on that formulation in the intervening years. Governments are nudged into abrupt and sometimes unwise action by the emotional effect on viewers of televised suffering and violence. The message to leaders is: "Do something! Anything!" Thus, the U.S. entered Somalia because of heart-rending telepictures of starving people; and it left because of heart-rending telepictures of an American soldier's body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. At least that's the widely held theory. U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright has complained that TV's graphic images heighten the pressure "both for immediate engagement in areas of international crisis and immediate disengagement whenvents do not go according to plan."

 But it all started in the mid-1800s with the telegraph, which found its most conspicuous utility in conveying news of the Civil War. No war before it had ever been reported with such celerity. (By 1909, a press critic was worrying that "America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was -- the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life -- into an agency for collecting, condensing, and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence.") Similarly, photography had its first great reportorial mission in the Civil War: Antietam, the goriest single day in American combat, was (as Neuman records) "the first battle whose dead were photographed as they lay, not as peaceful corpses in heavenly slumber but as bloated, gouged, twisted, grotesque figures in painful demise."

 Journalists welcomed the telephone and quickly learned that it was an easier and cheaper way than the telegraph to file their dispatches. The first phoned-in story ever went to The Boston Globe on February 2, 1877, a report of a lecture by Alexander Graham Bell. (It was a bit too early in media history for that reporter to bark: "Hello, sweetheart, gimme rewrite!") For a period from 1911 to 1967, newsreels shown twice a week in more than 15,000 movie theaters were a handy source of news for more than 40 million Americans. But it was radio that changed journalism, with its live, on-the-spot immediacy and its capacity to trigger the emotions of its listeners. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Adolf Hitler all understood instinctively the power of radio to arouse, persuade, and reassure.

 A quarter-century-old consensus has it that television was a major factor in the United States's abandonment of Vietnam, especially after Walter Cronkite declared the war unwinnable in his famous broadcast of February 27, 1968. Neuman posits, without documentation, that TV was not nearly so crucial to the process as most people think. Newspapers, she claims (also without proving her point), "had far more influence on public opinion" throughout the war.

 Neuman conveys sound insights into the effects of media in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as on their role in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia. But her book is essentially an introduction to the larger subject of public opinion formation and how politicians respond to it, or at times resist it. Most Americans, regrettably, still get most of their news from television and the resulting semi-baked views are tabulated by pollsters and too often alchemized into policy by politicians with a wet finger in the wind. It's a kind of Mobius strip that enforces a shotgun wedding between journalists and policy-makers.

 But as long ago as 1955, when television was still a toddler, Walter Lippmann already was deciding:

 Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West. . . . Public opinion is always wrong, much too intransigent in war, much too yielding in peace, insufficiently informed, lacking the specialized knowledge upon which lucid judgments can be based.

 Lippmann's thesis was turned on its head three decades later when public opinion -- in the Old World, not the New -- was sufficiently potent to help dismantle the walls of tyranny in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as the accretion of information from the West finally moved millions of the oppressed to breathe free.

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