Page 197 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

In the early years of the East-West conflict the governments of the
capitalist powers engaged in diplomatic and economic sanctions
against the Soviets. They also undertook an intense campaign of
propaganda directed at their own populations in an effort to prevent
them being ‘seduced’ by Bolshevism, or by milder forms of socialism
and social democracy. In the early 1920s the British establishment
manufactured the ‘Zinoviev letter’ in a 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 overthrowing
British capitalism. The letter was a forgery, but extensive media
publicity of its contents contributed to the Labour Party’s subsequent
electoral defeat.
In America, 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’ at home 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, monasteries
burned, and it was reported that the Bolsheviks in
Petrograd used an electrically operated guillotine to

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