ABSTRACT
Comparative and international administration has generally paid little attention to media issues. For example, administrative-media relations are not addressed in the overviews and handbooks from Heady (2001), Hyden (1997), Garcia-Zamor and Khator (1994), Baker (1994), Dwivedi and
Henderson (1990), and Rowat (1988). Whereas the first edition of Farazmand’s handbook did not include any entries for media relations, the second edition had one (Farazmand, 1991, 2001). That entry, by Kalantari, focused on the role of the media in the United States, its impact on the political system, and a short discussion of the implications of these trends on public administration (Kalantari, 2001). Although a helpful contribution, it did not address the broader scope of agency-media relations from international and comparative perspectives. A contributing factor to the minor attention paid to media relations is partly related to the limited ability to draw generalizations between the wide variety of the governmental and media systems of contemporary nation-states (Lenn, 1996, p. 441; Grunig, 1997, pp. 270-271).
