Page 202 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 anti-communism
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-ideological 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 performer, 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

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