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Book Review: AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present

Much of governing in contemporary states happens far from the scrutiny of elected officials; extra-legislative oversight (like the IG system, the news media, and others) becomes necessary for genuine accountability. For the future of democracy in its “monitory” phase, understanding an institution like the IGs is essential, but the IGs are understudied and all but invisible in political science, in political theory, and even more so in communication and journalism studies, despite the key interactions between reporters and IGs that Hilliard documents here. Hilliard’s work reminds us that understanding how journalists cover politics requires knowing that government changes even more than journalism does. While this is a study of American federal bureaucracy and one key mechanism for holding it to account, similar developments around the world have changed most democratic governments in the same direction at the same time. This is a fine book, richly detailed, conceptually sophisticated, and demonstrating the new significance of at least one way a state bureaucracy holds a whole range of state bureaucracies accountable, and of how sometimes critical public narratives of government are produced by government offices themselves, not by media and other civil society organizations alone. The study of “press/politics” needs more studies like this one.