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The “dirty thirties” of fascism vs socialism, war vs peace, and civilisation vs barbarism in China are described. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria was the point at which the true extent of Japanese aggression towards China was realised. In the early 1930s, it was far from clear, despite the annexation of Manchuria and Japanese machinations in Inner Mongolia and other border regions, that Shanghai and the whole of China would be pitched into all-out war. The 1932 Shanghai War, later known as the First Shanghai War, started after a Japanese-inspired provocation. Virtually the entire China press corps moved to Shanghai for the duration of the First Shanghai War. An account of the strange death of Gareth Jones is given. The Xian Incident and the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek in late 1936 were the major news stories and pivotal moments for China. The Osborn Radio Station was China's first wireless station.

Journalists and foreign correspondents try to reflect often complex events in faraway lands in a way their readers can hopefully understand. This was especially true of the old China press corps that started in the Canton Factories of the opium-dealers in the 1820s and reached its high point, both in terms of word count and number of reporters, in the 1930s and during the Second World War. The China press corps was the major interpreter of China to the outside world then as it is now. The members of the old China press corps were the witnesses and the primary interpreters of the history of modern China to millions around the world. The story of the old China press corps is described. By looking back at the men and women who have reported and written on China since the late 1820s, it might just be possible to gain some perspective on the media's current obsession with the China story.

The Chongqing press corps had to perform a balancing act with, on the one hand, the Chiangs, the Nationalist's press-control machine, and sympathetic media moguls like Luce and, on the other, a whole range of alternate voices from the Communists to Stilwell. The biggest literary icon to arrive in Chongqing was Ernest Hemingway, who came with his correspondent wife, the chain-smoking thirty-two-year-old Martha Gellhorn. The entire Hemingway-Gellhorn sojourn in China had been a mixed experience: both later professed their admiration and love for China and conversely their depression and hatred of the place. Hemingway perhaps summed up their journey best as an “unshakeable hangover”. Traditionally, relations between the Nationalists and the press corps had been fractious at best; indeed there was a long history of the government frustrating journalists, banning publications, and generally making life difficult. The chapter also considers the end of the Old China.

This chapter explores the Truman administration's publicity efforts in the first three weeks of the Korean War. Fearful that this new Cold War crisis might escalate into a far bigger conflict with the Soviet Union, the president and his senior advisers sought to keep the home front cool. They made few public statements. And what they did say was carefully restrained. Without a vigorous lead from the government, however, the Washington press corps and the Republican opposition soon moved to fill the information vacuum. While reporters often resorted to speculation, partisan politicians sought to place their own spin on the crisis, insisting that it was a product of the Democrats' excessively soft posture toward communism in Asia.

As the war against Japan ended, renewed civil war erupted between the Nationalists and Communists. For those who had been active in the press corps before the war, the writing was clearly on the wall, though they didn't always immediately see it and tried to restart life as before. Peace and a certain normality returned in Hong Kong but on the Mainland a new war was raging for control of China. With the end of the war in the Pacific and the liberation of Shanghai, a new crop of journalists arrived. Their journey was ultimately to be a different one from that of those who covered China in the first half of the century. Some found reporting on the Communist advance a dangerous and potentially lethal occupation. The chaos of the civil war also attracted a few chancers to China. After the Battle of Xuzhou, the Generalissimo had realised that his military position was hopeless but he was not prepared to surrender. The chapter discusses the problems for those who “lost China”, as well as the end of the Old China Press Corps.

Peter Fleming, who combined features and political reportage with travel writing, stands out as the most worthy of note. He was accompanied by Ella Maillart and they travelled 3,500-miles from Beijing to India via Turkestan, along with a Mr. Yao of the China Central News Agency. They also undertook the journey without the knowledge of the Chinese government which was not keen on issuing passes for foreigners to travel in the disputed and chaotic region. The ladies of the press and Shanghai's gangster no. 1 are described. Of all the women to join the China press corps, perhaps none was as notorious as Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She had two monkeys: the monkey on her back that was her opium addiction and the monkey on her shoulder that was Mr. Mills (technically a gibbon and therefore an ape, Mickey would castigate anyone who insulted him by calling him a mere monkey). In addition, the revolving doors of the China Press are reviewed. The two greatest exponents of cartoons in Shanghai press were Sapajou and Schiff.

On 4 May 1919, angered at the betrayal and fired up with a justified nationalist fervour, radicalised students staged large-scale demonstrations across China. These were the first mass protests in modern Chinese history and in many ways set the hallmark for the 1920s as a decade of domestic protest and internal unrest — what became known as the May Fourth Movement. This Movement was to usher in a new and chaotic decade in China's history and also a new crop of reporters, correspondents and writers. It is noted that the old guard was depleted. Arthur Ransome coined the term “Shanghai mind” and referred to the International Settlement as a “hermetically sealed glass case”. This notion of the treaty ports seeing things slightly differently was not totally new. The revolutionaries with typewriters are described. It is explained how the China press corps was about to become even more multi-layered, complicated, and cosmopolitan in the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century.

Like most recent presidents of the United States, George W. Bush embraced an approach to governing that is sometimes referred to as ‘the permanent campaign’. Scott McClellan, who served as Bush's White House press secretary, argues that the Bush administration's ‘excessive embrace of the permanent campaign’ was most consequential in terms of policy with regard to the war in Iraq. The permanent campaign was on display from the earliest days of the Bush administration. First, following the example of Ronald Reagan, it settled on a clear, simple agenda that focused primarily on four issues: education reform, faith-based initiatives, tax cuts, and military preparedness (including the need for a missile defence system). The Bush administration's emphasis on the permanent campaign led it to reorganise its communications staff. The White House Office of Media Affairs was moved out of the Press Office and made a separate department. Arguably these adjustments reflected the administration's desire to plan and execute a public relations campaign while, at the same time, playing down the importance of the White House press corps.

This chapter reviews various speeches and rhetorical approaches by President Roosevelt in the 1930s, with a focus on his conceptions of the public. While FDR was no doubt one of the more charismatic and persuasive presidents in American history, he was also one of most intentional when it came to shaping a public to his liking. The chapter reviews some speeches but focuses more intently on confidential conversations with the White House press corps.

This chapter considers two countries where journalists have been targeted with murder and violence—Russia and the Philippines. A combination of international and domestic pressure has forced their respective governments to take action. In both countries, fear and self-censorship have become deeply ingrained in the press corps, to the point that the flow of global information depends almost entirely on the willingness of journalists to risk their lives in reporting the news. In most cases, it is recognized that the motive for killing a journalist is to use violence as a form of censorship. The best way to weaken this logic is by keeping the story alive after a journalist is killed, by supporting media organizations and journalists that continue to cover sensitive issues, or, as stated by Mexican investigative reporter Marcela Turati, by not abandoning them.

This chapter examines the impact of Twitter on news reporting of election campaigns. Drawing on findings from a broad range of interviews with political journalists, it considers how the “affordances” of Twitter—those “features of a technology that make certain action possible”—are being utilized by campaign reporters. It begins with a discussion of campaign reporting in the past and goes on to review the emerging literature on journalists' use of social media. It then shows how Twitter has taken a central place in daily campaign reporting by focusing on the 2012 election. In particular, it explains how Twitter has extended what reporters call “the bubble,” referring to the traveling press corps. It also analyzes the impact of Twitter on reporters' transparency and objectivity and concludes by noting that journalists differ in their attitudes toward the new possibilities and imperatives of the Twitter-driven news environment.

A disarming personality and Quaker morality camouflaged Drew Pearson’s relentless, crusading journalism. His style set him apart from other Waeshington columnists. Rather than offer an informed interpretation of news that others had reported, his column generated its own news, well ahead of others. Unlike an investigative reporter, at the mercy of a single editor, Pearson’s syndicated column ran in so many newspapers that no editor could curtail him. Instead, if his accusations proved worrisome, editors would trim out its most troublesome passages. To gather news, Pearson employed a squad of reporters who served as his “private FBI,” cultivating sources at every level of government. Pearson’s exposés attracted readers but also made him powerful enemies in the White House and the Capitol. Breaking news also won the begrudging respect of other Washington reporters, whenever he had the nerve to write what they could not hope to get printed.

The bestselling book Washington Merry-Go-Round prompted its two anonymous authors, Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, to launch a nationally syndicated column in 1932. The urbane and elegant Pearson differed markedly from the brusque and pugnacious Allen, but they shared a belief that the rest of the Washington press corps was often too timid to show how government really worked. Pearson grew up in the Quaker community of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where his father taught speech and ran a Chautauqua tent show. After he toured the world as a reporter, Drew Pearson married the daughter of Washington publisher Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson and entered the capital’s high society, making valuable contacts. Unabashedly provocative, Pearson and Allen chose to specialize in unauthorized information and drummed the word “leaks” into Americans’ everyday vocabulary.