Page 200 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 179

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
In the 1940s the notion of the Soviet Union as a global threat to freedom
and democracy was complemented by the ‘threat’ of internal communist
subversion. In 1948 the US Congress established the House Un-American
Activities Committee to investigate alleged communist infiltration of the US
political, military and cultural establishment. The committee hearings
developed into ‘witch-hunts’, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and sup-
ported by Hollywood stars such as Ronald Reagan, James Stewart, John
Wayne, and Bing Crosby, who lent their reputations and artistic resources to
the anti-communist cause.
These were the years of the ‘Cold War’ proper. Stalin died in 1953, to be
replaced by Nikita Krushchev, while John F. Kennedy became President of
the US. Kennedy continued the anti-communist theme in US government
policy and propaganda, sanctioning the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
and authorising the first dispatches of troops to Vietnam. He also brought
the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout
these tense and anxiety-ridden years, anti-communism was a given in
Western politics and culture.
By the late 1960s and the arrival of Richard Nixon as US President, it
seemed that the worst years of the Cold War were over, with both sides
embracing the policy of détente, amounting to a mutual acceptance of each
other’s differences and legitimate interests. In the Western media anti-
Sovietism softened, as Nixon and Brezhnev signed historic arms control,
economic and cultural agreements.
By the late 1970s, however, détente was under strain. In the US and
Britain radical right-wing politicians were coming to power, who included in
their ideological armoury a fierce anti-Sovietism. Between them, Ronald
Reagan’s Republican administration and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative
government revived the Cold War and initiated a decade of East–West
hostility. These were the years of the Korean Airlines disaster; the boycotts,
by West and East respectively, of the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympic
games; of public discussion by senior NATO figures of the possibility of
limited nuclear war in Europe; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US
invasion of Grenada.
I have written elsewhere about the causes and cultural consequences of
the ‘second’ Cold War (McNair, 1988). Here, we note that a renewed US and
British commitment to economic, military and ideological struggle with the
Soviet Union and its allies was reflected in journalistic and entertainment
media. To justify and win support for the huge increases in arms spending
that the new Cold War required, the Soviet Union was depicted in official
statements, policy documents and Hollywood movies alike as a menacing,
evil power, bent on world domination. Herman and Broadhead document
the way in which the attempted assassination of the Pope in 1982 by a
Turkish neo-fascist became the occasion for a wave of manufactured anti-
Soviet propaganda (1986). The Korean Airlines disaster of 1983 was

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