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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 180

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
presented by the Reagan administration as clear evidence of the USSR’s
‘terrorism’ and innate ‘barbarism’ (Herman, 1986; McNair, 1988).
Such campaigns were not prepared in isolation from the surrounding
political environment. To the surprise of the Thatcher and Reagan govern-
ments, millions of people in the US and Western Europe refused to endorse
many of the assumptions of NATO’s Cold War policies. They rejected
NATO’s view of the USSR as a uniquely evil and threatening power, and
resisted the nuclear expansion being pursued by the US and Britain. The rise
of the peace movements in the 1980s (see previous chapter) threatened to
undermine public support for the pursuit of the new Cold War. In this
context, governments hoped that anti-Soviet propaganda would help to
reinforce public opinion. The Korean Airlines disaster, for example, was a
key moment in NATO’s efforts to convince Western European public
opinion that it should permit the installation of cruise missiles at bases in
Britain and Germany. In America, the disaster and the propaganda use made
of it by the administration smoothed the way for Congressional endorsement
of hitherto controversial weapons programmes such as the MX missile
system and binary nerve gas production (McNair, 1988; Edelman, 1988).
In so far as partial, distorted, and exaggerated information about the
Soviet Union and ‘communism’ emanated from and was disseminated by
official sources through the mass media it was ‘political communication’,
intended to influence the political environment and mobilise public opinion
behind certain specific policies. As such, the years of the new Cold War are
illustrative of the pattern, observed since the first red scares of the early
twentieth century, in which ‘the twists and turns of media anticommunism
and alarmism largely parallel similar shifts in official policy’ (Parenti, 1986,
p. 135). Communication about the Soviet Union in the 1980s was, as it had
been in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, communication with politico-ideo-
logical motivations and objectives.
The success of such communication cannot be taken for granted, as the
persistence of the peace movement in the 1980s showed. The effectiveness of
messages about the evil and threatening nature of Soviet Communism was
largely dependent, like the other aspects of political communication with
which this book has dealt, on the strategies of persuasion adopted by their
senders. In this respect, Ronald Reagan was a powerful and effective per-
former, surrounded by a public relations and news management apparatus
which frequently enabled him to seize media attention and set the public
agenda (McNair, 1988). In sharp contrast, Soviet public relations remained,
until the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as CPSU General Secretary in
1985, a contradiction in terms. While Reagan communicated directly to the
populations of the NATO countries using satellite and other advanced
technologies, presenting the US case in deceptively simple and compelling
terms, the Soviet government hid behind a veil of defensiveness and secrecy.
Soviet accounts of events such as the KAL 007 disaster or the war in

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