Over recent years media history has attracted increasing attention among scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the question of American influence lingers in most of the recently published works on European media history. As transmitters of ‘soft power’, the mass media sit at the centre of current globalization/Americanization debates, and yet the media dimension in transatlantic relations has suffered from a surprising degree of neglect, as the editors of this stimulating volume point out. Only Jeremy Turnstall's classic study, The media are American (1977), with its telling subtitle ‘Anglo-American media in the world’, emphasized the heavy British involvement in what is commonly regarded as American global media dominance. Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton have now brought together a useful collection of fourteen essays that examine the institutional and personal connections, and cultural borrowings, among British and American media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The book is organized into four thematic sections. Part i compares explicitly British and US media practice, revealing a significant degree of commonalities. Richard Fulton's analysis of war coverage during the Spanish-American and Sudan Wars of 1898 emphasizes that ‘the discourse of American and British war correspondents was virtually indistinguishable’ (p. 13). Sensationalism was a defining element of war coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, but utilized in different nationalist frameworks: reports from Santiago that appeared in the American quality press were far more sensational than those that appeared in their British counterparts; conversely, the sensationalist elements in reports from Sudan that appeared in the British press were mostly edited out in the United States. Matt McIntire compares late nineteenth-century press coverage of baseball and cricket. In both countries, the press helped these sports become an increasingly important part of leisure culture, and argued that baseball and cricket were significant to their respective cultures. Joel H. Wiener contributes a stimulating piece explaining why speed was a more persistent element in America than in Britain, and how this affected the interaction of journalism between the countries. In his view, the intensity of journalistic rivalry in American cities led to competitive battles over local news, with reporters prowling assigned beats in search of a ‘scoop’. British journalists, in comparison, generally moved at a more leisurely pace. They were also considerably more formal, in dress and conduct. Thus, while ‘impertinent’ American interviewers stalked their prey and used a rapid crossfire technique of interrogation to elicit information that was then condensed in a ‘personal write up’, British interviews were arranged by formal appointment (sometimes up to ten days in advance), recorded in shorthand, and submitted to the interviewee for approval. Practices on the other side of the Atlantic significantly shaped the self-perception of practitioners in both the US and Britain.

Part ii of the book engages with individual media figures who contributed to the construction of a transatlantic media culture. Christopher Kent presents the career of Matt Morgan, a nineteenth-century cartoonist, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an excellent piece highlighting the degree of transatlantic contacts and exchanges, and an intriguing insight into the close-knit community of wood engravers and illustrators. Equally insightful is James Startt's analysis of Britain's leading interpreter of American culture, James Bryce, and his changing views of the American press. Starting out from a positive view in The American Commonwealth (1888), he became increasingly sceptical about newspapers' sensationalism and their tendency to inflame international relations. Towards the end of his ambassadorship in Washington he described the American press as a disease that had to be tolerated as ‘no cure has been or can be discovered’ (p. 98), a view which also coloured his treatment of the press in his last work, Modern democracies (1921). Yet he also retained his faith in the power of public opinion, and saw in the press an indispensable instrument connecting government with the people. The book's ‘People’ section is rounded off with a contribution by Fred Leventhal on two transatlantic film stars, Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks, and their role in promoting the Anglo-American war-time alliance in the early years of the Second World War.

Compared with the first two sections of the book, Part iii – on Anglo-American identities – is less convincing. Michael de Nie provides an account of the American Civil War as covered by the London press, highlighting British ambivalence about the relationship between American culture and British identity. Jessica Bennett and Mark Hampton analyse the language used in British First World War propaganda and argue that the increasingly pro-British American press is evidence of the successful creation of a common Anglo-American identity. Thomas Hajkowski's contribution argues that the promotion of empire in the BBC's programming in the 1940s can be seen as a ‘rejection of American culture’ and an ‘effective opposition to Americanization’ (p. 187). While the reader sympathizes with the view that imperial popular culture was more enduring in Britain than scholars have long supposed, there is too little evidence here on reception to make this claim very convincing.

Finally, Part iv deals directly with the issue of Americanization in the twentieth-century British media. Siân Nicholas studies the negotiations between the BBC and its various news suppliers, especially the Canadian-registered subsidiary of UPA (United Press of America), during the 1930s. This was not just a commercial dispute between (British) vested interests and (American) competitors centring on ‘news’ as a commodity. As Nicholas emphasizes, it was also a cultural dispute about the ‘national character’ of news, and more generally part of the growing discussion about global American media influence in a time of British imperial decline. This is followed by an excellent contribution by Peter Miskell on the importance of the UK film market for American film producers. Turning the well-known issue of the American film invasion of Europe on its head, Miskell demonstrates the unequal power relationship between British film exhibitors and US film producers: an individual firm like United Artists relied more heavily on the UK market for sales and profits than British cinema exhibitors relied on it. The importance of the UK market meant that American film producers ‘frequently made pictures designed to appeal to British audiences, and seldom produced films depicting the British in a negative light’ (p. 231). Tom O'Malley explores the variety and nature of the Labour Movement's responses to US media from the Beveridge Report on Broadcasting (1949–51) to the Pilkington Commission (1960–2), concluding that labelling them as ‘typically anti-American’ would do injustice to the substance and quality of these concerns. Stefan Schwarzkopf contributes a stimulating piece on the reciprocal influence of the British and American advertising industries, demonstrating how American primacy in the 1950s and 1960s was followed by the resurgence of British advertisers in the 1970s, and the British-led concentration of the advertising industry through mergers and acquisitions in the 1980s. In the final piece of the volume, Christine Becker analyses the launch of BBC America in the late 1990s, a cable channel and joint venture with Discovery Networks, which is successfully selling itself as a hybrid of the best of British and American television. According to Becker, the trans-national identity of BBC America represents hip global culture in the present.

In their introduction, the editors state that they want to ‘raise important questions about the transatlantic media's role in the construction of national identities and the emergence of global culture’ (p. 1). After reading the essays, one remains unconvinced that Benedict Anderson works terribly well as a starting point for exploring nineteenth- and twentieth-century transatlantic media interactions. But there can be no doubt that a unitary concept such as ‘Americanization’ does little justice to the complex set of relationships as described in this stimulating book. And if, as the editors point out, many of these essays reflect early stages of larger research projects, this reader at least looks forward to future offerings.