Page 215 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

internal communist subversion. In 1948 the US Congress estab-
lished the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate
alleged communist infiltration of the US political, military and
cultural establishment. The committee hearings developed into
‘witch-hunts’, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported by
Hollywood stars such as Ronald Reagan, James Stewart, John
Wayne, and Bing Crosby, who lent their reputations and artistic
resources to the anti-communist cause.
These were the years of the ‘Cold War’ proper. Stalin died in
1953, to be replaced by Nikita Krushchev, while John F. Kennedy
became President of the US. Kennedy continued the anti-communist
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 US
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 conse-
quences 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,

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