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

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

Laura Roselle

'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 unsuccessful wars. In her study of Soviet news management of the Afghanistan War and the U.S. presidential struggle with Vietnam, she reveals critical power linkages among the executive, the media and the public. In exploring this relationship, Roselle sheds light on the complex and nuanced relationship between political leaders and the image of their countries that they struggle to project. This study is particularly valuable at a time when leaders of major countries again attempt to use conflict - in Chechnya and Iraq in particular - to project a particular