‘How the Cold War Broke the News’

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Barbie Zelizer has always been intrigued by the Cold War, its secrecy, and the fact that it was a war without any active military action between the central adversaries—a war without warfare.

Zelizer, the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and director of the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication, has focused much of her scholarship on images of conflict. But as she set about writing a book on Cold War imagery, she realized she wanted to tell a larger story, one that moves away from just images and shows instead how deep-seated practices from the period undercut all forms of journalism.

What resulted is her new book, “How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism’s Decline.” She argues against placing all the blame for journalism’s woes—such as inadequate funding and declining public trust—on big tech and market forces. Instead, she says, we need to focus on problematic journalistic practices dating to the beginning of American journalism that were solidified during the Cold War and persist today.

In the book, she identifies three markers of these Cold War-era journalistic practices: enmity, invisibility, and outreach, which collectively “helped create and sustain an understanding that America was prosecuting a necessary and winnable war,” Zelizer says.

Enmity, she explains, is the idea that the United States is perpetually locked in an us-versus-them situation—whether “them” refers to an external enemy or internal threat. During the Cold War, news coverage, headlines, and images consistently taught Americans to view Russians as the “other.”

But the media also reinforced enmity within the U.S., Zelizer says, turning this war against communism inward. As the government compiled lists of “suspected” individuals to target, censor, and punish, journalists failed to report fully on what was happening, including not taking Joseph McCarthy seriously and calling McCarthyism an overplayed story.

Invisibility refers to the idea that the public can accept the media’s claims without needing evidence—here, the assertion that a war was being fought despite the absence of destruction, injuries, or clear adversaries, says Zelizer.

Journalists helped Americans feel they were at war by publishing cartoons and graphics in lieu of photos, using terms like “Iron Curtain” and “Soviet bloc” that suggested imperviousness, and writing headlines that measured the temperature of war dynamics through terms like “cooling down” or “boiling over.” The flip side, she adds, was making real events invisible, citing how proxy wars during the Cold War era were rarely reported on fully.

The final theme Zelizer discusses is outreach, referring to the idea that the media can be used as an instrument to help people understand public affairs. During the Cold War, the U.S. government prepared films and pamphlets for media dissemination in areas under Soviet rule, and media ranging from the government-run Voice of America to private broadcast networks tried to accommodate what the federal government wanted them to say, effectively turning journalists into cheerleaders for governmental and commercial objectives.

“The issue with this is that what we often have is too-close proximity between journalism and either the government or the market,” Zelizer says. “When we can’t see their collaboration, it moves in directions that can’t be monitored.”

Notably, she says, the markers of enmity, invisibility, and outreach didn’t go away when the Cold War ended. She considers current ideological divides such as liberal versus conservative and secular versus religious, as a direct descendants of Cold War enmity. She sees invisibility in reporting on the global war on terror, where an unending ideological war is made visible while smaller conflicts involving territorial occupation, election meddling, and regime overthrow are hidden. And she perceives cronyism between journalistic, political, and commercial forces driving coverage of events ranging from the Gaza war to the recent New York City mayoral election.

“We cannot continue practicing journalism as we practice it today, the same way that we cannot continue practicing politics the way we practice politics today,” says Zelizer. She adds that there is no hope of getting away from the Cold War logic of American journalism unless media on the right and left understand that they face the same future.

“Each side has to recognize that the other voice deserves to be in the media environment just as much as they do, and they have to practice humility for themselves and dignity for others,” Zelizer says. “Were each side to adopt humility for themselves and dignity for the other, there might be a way for rebuild a journalism that is meant for all.”