The Contemporary Debate

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to review some of the literature that has informed the current (i.e., the last half-century) debate over media effects on foreign policy decision making in Liberal societies. In describing and assessing the state of the art we can consolidate the arguments that have produced the most notable results and organize them so that consistencies and contradictions can be revealed. This lays the framework for developing an explicit hypothesis about media pressure in chapter 3, which is then tested in the next chapters.