Page 216 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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
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

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