Spin Wars & Spy Games

The disruptions of the news-gathering business haven’t been felt just in coverage of Washington and the states. Many Americans and U.S. policymakers once got their international news from the bureaus, correspondents and stringer networks run by American and Western news outlets. Markos Kounalakis, a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Budapest-based Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University, has written “Spin Wars and Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering,” as a study of the evolution of the global news media and the heavy investment in state media by countries such as Russian and China at the same time that Western media pulls back.