What kind of propaganda was used during the cold war

Re-examination of Western propaganda operations and values was made urgently necessary when the Soviet Union scored a propaganda triumph last autumn by launching the first earth satellite. That event not only enhanced Russia's scientific prestige but also indicated that it had gone further in missile development than had been supposed. The result was to increase uneasiness among peoples close to the shadow of Soviet power and make them more ready than formerly to grasp at plans, however imperfect and dangerous, that seemed to give hope of warding off nuclear holocaust.

Some Western leaders were thus put under obligation to make their own peoples aware of pitfalls in Soviet proposals as well as to combat the effects of Red propaganda among peoples not directly lined up in the East-West struggle.

The cold war has been described as basically a contest for men's minds, and countries of the free world have found that ideals of freedom do not always speak for themselves among ignorant and poverty-stricken masses. Communists long have been ardent battlers for the minds of all peoples.

Nikita S. Help Login. Search by keyword. Congress U. Presidency U. All Rights Reserved. Cold War Propaganda. Controlling Scientific Information. Trends in U. Russia's Diplomatic Offensive. The United States was a relative latecomer to the world of mass propaganda and public diplomacy. Whilst the British and French had come to comprehend the potential benefits offered by supplementing conventional methods of statecraft with cultural and economic initiatives during the twilight years of the nineteenth century, decision-makers on the other side of the Atlantic were reluctant to implicate the ideas that had underpinned the domestic body-politic in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy [6].

The emergence of structural and ideological bi-polarity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War led to a fundamental reappraisal of this stance in Washington. In the period , a number of key political figures successfully argued that the propagation of ideas should be considered as one of the principal conduits for countering Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and halting the global expansion of Marxism-Leninism [8].

Propagandists in the United States were, thus, not only concerned with promoting liberal democratic culture and free-market capitalism, but also with exploiting the mechanisms and apparatus of both.

For a nation that was struggling to systematically export a narrow vision of culture to the rest of the world, whilst simultaneously asserting that the advantage of that very culture lay in its spontaneity, the existence of a diverse, occasionally sophisticated, and often cooperative, indigenous private media infrastructure was seen to be enormously valuable. Although a body of scholarship exists that effectively takes this position at face value, there are several factors, frequently overlooked, which challenge its validity.

Most conspicuously, the semi autonomous nature of most American or American backed cultural entities meant that successive administrations found it difficult to maintain a satisfactory link between the strategic orientation of US propaganda policy and its implementation on an operational level.

As the propaganda network that was aiming its transmitters eastward was necessarily functionally independent, it, at the same time, proved almost impossible for US authorities to ensure that this stance was reflected in the content of the programmes broadcast.

The costs of this operational weak spot were rendered plainly evident during the short-lived Hungarian uprising of This was when, in a move that considerably attenuated the credibility of US propaganda in Central Eastern Europe for the next thirty years, several RFE newscasts erroneously claimed that the US was preparing to intervene on behalf of the anti-Soviet element [14].

Nor was this an isolated incident. This was not a complication that confined itself to a few overzealous foreign exiles. Throughout the four-decade long East-West standoff, a formidable coalition of domestic media outlets, public bodies, and private interest groups, regularly pursued courses of action, which brought the United States into disrepute.

His concerns were arguably well founded [17]. Similarly, the gloomy coverage of the Tet-Offensive by the major television networks is widely considered to have swayed public opinion against the Vietnam War.

The intelligence community did endeavour to address this predicament by covertly influencing the contours of Western cinema, art, and academia. Not only did the agency directly interfere in the production of Hollywood films, but it also created a whole host of purportedly self-directed bodies such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In the long run, however, this turned out to be counter-productive [21]. The unavoidable reliance of the propaganda bureaucracy on the private media-entertainment complex, therefore, presented US policymakers with a paradox not faced by their equivalents in Moscow — they were damned if they interfered and they were damned if they did not.

As such, the notion that the existence of a private cultural sphere in the United States was the critical variable in the clash of ideas does not stand up to scrutiny. Since television and television news were fairly new, networks would seek out sponsorships from other places.

Seizing the opportunity, the U. As a result the content on the television and news heavily revolved around presenting negative perceptions of the Soviet Union. There were also a series of campaigns aimed at how to be a patriotic citizen by supporting democracy, free speech and free markets. Although, the propaganda campaigns promoted free market, the government during this time essentially had control over content of television media.

In conclusion, the common denominator for nearly all cold war propaganda campaigns was the fear and uncertainty of the future. The fear created an environment that the US Government took advantage of in order to convince people the American Way was the right way. Cold War propaganda didn't just stop at the promotion of Western culture, but it also instilled even more fear for communism which begins a cycle of fear, then persuasion through propaganda, to fear and so on.

The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only.