Page 197 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 176

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
bid to prevent the election of a Labour government. The letter, allegedly from
the Soviet Foreign Minister, suggested that a future Labour government
would be the ‘creature’ of the Bolsheviks, carrying out their will and over-
throwing British capitalism. The letter was a forgery, but extensive media
publicity of its contents contributed to the Labour Party’s subsequent
electoral defeat.
In the US, the first ‘Red scare’ began shortly after the revolution in 1918,
lasting until 1920. The scare, argues historian Murray Levin, was initiated
by a coalition of corporate, media and governmental interests, led by the US
Steel Corporation, which in 1917 experienced major industrial unrest. In
response the president of the corporation, Judge Elbert Gray, organised what
Levin calls ‘a nationwide public relations campaign to create the stereotype
of rampant Bolshevism in the steel industry’ (1971, p. 40). The strikes were
presented by national newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall
Street Journal as prefiguring ‘a Bolshevik holocaust’ (ibid., p. 38). The
unions were accused of being communist-led. Robert Murray observes that
public opinion was initially sympathetic to the aims of the unions and
opposed to the heavy-handed strike-breaking tactics of the employers. The
latter, therefore, had to ‘promote a more favourable public opinion toward
their own positions. Perceiving that their greatest ally was the latent public
fear of the strike’s radicalism, the steel interests realised that much of the
current animosity to [them] would disappear and the strike would fail if the
public could be convinced that “bolshevism” was the only strike issue’
(1955, p. 142).
The public relations campaign against ‘communism’ was complemented
by tendentious and sensational reporting of Soviet Russia itself. As Levin
describes:

newspapers, with rare exceptions, portrayed the revolution as an
orgy of mass murder, individual assassination, rape, pillage, and
slaughter. It was commonly claimed that nuns were raped, monas-
teries burned, and it was reported that the Bolsheviks in Petrograd
used an electrically operated guillotine to behead five hundred
victims per hour. Bolshevik rule was described as a compound of
slaughter, confiscation, anarchy, and universal disorder.
(1971, p. 95)

Using unchecked rumours, word-of-mouth gossip and the kind of atrocity
stories employed against the Germans in the 1914–18 war, the US media,
supporting the chairman of US Steel and its allies in business and the
Congress, created a climate of political hysteria in which to frame domestic
industrial relations problems. For Levin ‘the hysteria was an attempt –
largely successful – to reaffirm the legitimacy of the power elite of capitalism
and to further weaken workers’ class consciousness’ (ibid., p. 90).

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