Page 201 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 United
States 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 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 governments, millions of people in the US and Western
Europe refused to endorse many of the assumptions of NATO’s

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