Chapter 1 considers Streit’s early years. It begins with his path from an ambitious high school and university student in Montana to Europe: as soldier in World War I, as a low-level member of the US delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, as a Rhodes scholar, and finally as a budding journalist. It then examines his emergence as a well-regarded foreign correspondent during the 1920s, a period often presented as the profession’s golden age. Although Streit lacked the glamor of better-known celebrity colleagues, his experiences offer another perspective on the work of interwar foreign correspondents. The final section focuses on Streit’s tenure as the New York Times’ correspondent in Geneva for much of the 1930s covering the League of Nations. This extended posting provides an intriguing vantage point for reconsidering the League’s place in US foreign relations at the time.

This chapter examines the New York Times’ representation of the Elián González custody case in 1999 within the broader context of the conflict between the United States and Cuba. The central question that frames this work is the extent to which the ideas that underpin the conflict can be shown to influence the Times’ coverage of this specific episode – i.e., the extent to which the coverage of an episode can be influential on the broader conflict. The results point to support for the hypotheses that the discourses represented by the New York Times in its coverage of the González case corresponded with the themes of the broader conflict between the United States and Cuba and that American sources represented in the coverage exemplified predictable attitudes about Cuba and Communism.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between presidential remarks on Supreme Court cases and news coverage of those remarks. We argue that presidents make concerted efforts to influence media coverage of their perspectives to mold how the public thinks about the constitutional issues involved in the Court’s cases. We examine the ability of presidents to shape the volume of news attention to the Court’s cases, as well as the tone of newspaper coverage of the president’s remarks (using Lexicoder text analysis software) for all New York Times coverage of presidential speeches on Supreme Court decisions from 1953 to 2017. We find that presidents are capable of influencing the volume of news coverage of their discussions of Court cases, with coverage associated with the length and type of the presidential statement, the tone presidents use to describe the cases, and the timing and location of the speech, among other factors. However, presidents are generally incapable of affecting the tone of media coverage of their remarks.