Page 217 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

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
case in deceptively simple and compelling terms, the Soviet govern-
ment 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 Gorbachev 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, Gorbachev’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

196