Page 203 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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
Afghanistan were never effectively communicated on the
international stage. If the 1980s were years of sustained propaganda
warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, in which
international public opinion was the prize to be won, the USSR
fought with two hands tied behind its back. Only when Mikhail
Gorbachev came to power, armed with an appreciation of news
management and public relations techniques, did the Soviet position
on events and issues begin to emerge with some accuracy in the
Western media. At the Reykjavik summit of 1988, for example, the
Soviet side supplied a news-hungry media with a rich diet of briefings
(on and off the record) and photo-opportunities. Raisa Gorbachev
made herself available for the cameras, while at the end of the
summit her husband mounted a two-hour tour de force news
conference for the assembled media. Reagan, by contrast, appeared
hesitant and ill-briefed (McNair, 1991).
The years between 1985 and 1991, when Gorbachov led the Soviet
Union, illustrate the fact that source strategies are of profound
importance in political communication. As the previous chapter
argued, the Western media, by virtue of their dependence on sources
and attraction to certain types of news material, will provide spaces
for views not those of the ‘ruling elite’ to be reported. While the pro-
establishment biases of the media as a whole are amply documented,
Gorbachov’s successful advocacy of the Soviet perspective in the years
of perestroika provide further evidence of the potential of skilful
public relations in challenging these biases. It hardly seems an
exaggeration to state that the end of the ‘new Cold War’, and decades
of East-West tension, were greatly facilitated by the source strategies
of Gorbachov and his media advisers and spokespersons. The changes
in presentation were accompanied, of course, by major developments
in Soviet foreign and domestic policy, which might have rendered
the ‘Soviet threat’ concept untenable in any case. Of major
importance, however, is the fact that Gorbachov, as the public face
of the Soviet Union during these years, effectively communicated to
the world a vision of Soviet society, and an account of Soviet
government policy, which undermined the Cold War propaganda of
the NATO allies and eventually made it appear anachronistic. In
this sense, one might say, skilful political communication brought an
end to the Cold War.

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