← New Books Network
New Books Network
Barbie Zelizer, "How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline" (Polity, 2025)
00:40:29
Loading summary
Transcript31 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Barbie Zelizer about her book titled how the Cold War Broke the the Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline. Published by Polity in 2025. This book goes back to the Cold War to try and make sense of what is going on with the media today. There's all sorts of things happening in terms of polarization and balkanization and kind of covering some types of events really obsessively and not covering other types of events really at all. And that's really a reality that we're all living in. And this book traces some of the origins of that to help make sense of where we've ended up, which is obviously interesting historically and potentially even useful going forward too. So, Barbie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
- [01:00]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [01:02]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:08]
A
I started this book because I was continuing my long held interest in images and war conflict, memory and journalism. And so I was thinking about doing a book on what. What could a war without images look like? How would the media depict a war that did not have death or devastation or structural. Structural destruction or victimhood. Right. At least not in the place of the two protagonists. What would that look like in images? And as I was looking through, I found that there really weren't the kinds of images I had expected to find. There were no photographs, at least very few photographs that performed the kind of central role in kind of entrenching a particular visual memory of the war. But there were a lot of other things. There were cartoons, there were graphs, there were maps. And so I began to realize that this might be not so much about depicting a war, but about imagining a war. And that got me thinking a little bit more broadly. And I began to recognize that actually the whole mindset that was driving the US Media during the coverage of the Cold War was rather odd and rather familiar. And I kept asking myself, why is it? Why is it that the things that came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, kind of, they're still with us. And that's really where I started from. And so I began to look at what I called the Cold War mindset, which was, you know, a logic, a frame of mind that prompts people to behave as if they are in the Cold War. And for journalists, it foregrounds a particular way of covering the news that acts in response to the realities that people experienced in the Cold War. And we know these, but, you know, their secrecy, it's fear, it's suspicion, it's acquiescence, it's a strident opposition to communism. And it's fine to see these during the moments of the Cold War, but I realized very much from the get go that they were as much with us today as they were then. And that's where the book took off.
- [03:45]
B
Yeah, I think we want to talk about this mindset and logic more because that really is quite key to make sense of all of this. Can you tell us about what you mean by Cold War logic and how we can identify it?
- [03:56]
A
Right. It's when current events get explained through a prism that doesn't take the events on their own terms as they are unfolding, but refracts them through a way of thinking that comes from Cold War times. This was a point in time in which the American news media were corralled into this very odd place which was reporting Cold War realities at the same time as they were trying to sustain their autonomy. And because the Cold War expected of people, extreme patriotism expected of the media, a fair degree of jingoism, it became very difficult from the beginning to figure out how to cover the events from any other perspective. And so the mindset that overtook journalism, which I argue actually overtook most American institutions and remains central in most American institutions. I mean, think politics, think education, think the law, think the idea of social welfare. Any American institution that came of age during the late 1940s and early 1950s and played a part in the prosecution of the Cold War, needed to go by this frame of mind. It needed to make sense of things. They needed to make sense of things in ways that accommodated the realities of the war. And that meant adopting secrecy, cowering with fear, it meant being suspicious of others, and. And above all, it meant acquiescence to the powers that be. And so the idea that there was a prism for making sense of the news, that that was necessary for institutions to actually operate, I think was. Was fairly central to what I started to analyze is.
- [06:09]
B
And to clarify, to make sure we understand kind of how pervasive this is, because what you've described there really does seem quite all encompassing. This isn't just something that's impacting the media on the left or just on the right, is that correct?
- [06:21]
A
Oh, absolutely not. This impacts everybody in the media. And that's one of the Central themes of my book is that this is not a story about the left or the right. It is a story about how they get entangled with each other around the realities that. That drove the Cold War. So both sides, right, are equally. Are equally involved, as I would argue, in all institutions. All the necessary, all. All the pieces need to. Need to kind of play the part or else, you know, the mindset doesn't take shape.
- [06:55]
B
That's helpful to lay out then, as a foundation, because we do want to make sure that that theme comes through, that it's not just kind of one side or the other. It's this whole ecosystem, really. Is it something that kind of comes out of nowhere with the Cold War? Or do we see any ingredients of this from before 1950?
- [07:15]
A
Yeah, there's no way that any American institution could build itself in a year or two with the onset of the Cold War. So, no, most of the Cold War frame actually builds upon aspects of journalism that had been there from the very beginning of American journalism. A sense of American exceptionalism, of course, drove the media in this country from the earliest days of colonialism, through the Revolutionary War, through the Civil War. That was accompanied by a distinct sense of ethnocentrism, the idea that not only are we unique and singular as an American country nation, but we also understand that what is most important for us is how we think. And so from the very beginning, beginning, the twinning of these two concepts drove a particular haughtiness, if I might call it that, to the ways in which coverage prevailed. The accommodation of jingoism and patriotism should be clear. Because anytime this nation, as many others have gone to war, patriotism rises and jingoism accompanies it. There was elitism, there was cronyism, a way too cozy relationship with sources. And over time, this developed into the kind of default setting that journalists act from within without really recognizing that it's there. One aspect of these early days of American journalism was partisanship. But because partisanship drops off by about the mid-1800s, it becomes replaced with something thing that I would argue for Cold War. For the aims of the Cold War was even more instrumental, which was the fact that American journalists thought that they could be independent if they avoided having a voice in the news. So that the kind of downfall of partisanship comes with a kind of smashing of the idea of perspective. And so things like objectivity, like neutrality, like balance begin to take the shape the place of partisanship. And American journalists used all of these aspects or relied on all of these aspects very much without thinking. It was a very kind of unconscious or subconscious setting that, over time, gets played out with particular aspects of news language, for instance, formulaic or dramatic stories, stereotypical thinking. And it also plays out with a particular response to power, which is the nod toward moderation, deference, timidity, and all that comes with it. Euphemism, understatement, qualification. So we get this kind of jumble of aspects of journalism, some from the colonial times, some from the revolutionary times, some from the mid-1800s, when we start moving through. Through the professionalism of journalists, and we begin to understand that acquiescence kind of becomes the key to actually link this to the Cold War mindset. And so the Cold War mindset kind of piggybacks onto these aspects of journalism that predated the Cold War and make them. It entrenches them, it sinks them, and it makes it very difficult to. To operate journalism in any other way.
- [11:19]
B
That's really helpful to understand the origins before the Cold War, but the sort of difficulty of, as you said, operating any other way, I think is worth exploring a little bit more. Can we discuss kind of how this got so embedded, right? Like, why in this moment did all of this come together so intensely?
- [11:36]
A
Right. I mean, it's hard to remember that journalists really weren't given many choices. And journalists during the Cold War were very quickly kind of rolled into the war effort. So the idea of kind of changing, of kind of resisting, of even kind of, you know, stepping away in very small steps, it really wasn't in the cards. And that's because journalists, by and large, are very slow, even resistance to change. And because this works during the Cold War, it hardens as all the events of the Cold War take shape. It's what I call occupational fixity. It's the idea that journalists tend to keep old norms, old values intact. They tend to rely on familiar conventions or routines. And so it's easier to hold on to these things than to challenge this. And at a point in time when the government was really kind of pointing to everybody saying, you, too, must join the war effort, it became that much easier to kind of come on board.
- [12:59]
B
Okay, yeah. That is helpful to remember, given that it is a while back in time, so thinking about the conditions in which journalists were operating, another key aspect you discuss in the book is enmity. Can we talk about that in this context of Cold War logic and journalism?
- [13:17]
A
Yeah. Well, the important thing about enmity is that it has driven American journalism forever. I mean, you know, part of the exceptionalism, right. The elitism that really kind, the ethnocentrism that really kind of drives American journalism has always depended on the ability to look at the other person, at the other country, the other side, and categorize it or classify it as something different from, from ourselves. And I think Daniel Boorstrom was one of the former congressional librarian, was one of the first people to say that America can only accommodate one enemy at a time. But the underside of that statement is that enmity is important to form nationhood. We have to know who they are so that we are who. We have to know who they are not, right? So that we can know who we are, right? And so idea that the news becomes always about us versus them right is a very appealing motif in the news. And it certainly pushes a very simplified, very often erroneous, but highly instrumental way of seeing ourselves in conjunction with other people. And during the Cold War, I mean, enmity was one of three markers that actually are used to kind of solidify all the texture that we're talking about, all the sides of journalism that showed themselves as relevant. But it wasn't just enemy beyond. It wasn't just the US versus the Soviet Union. It was enmity within, right? And so if you've got this combination of enemy beyond and enemy within, it becomes very hard to see anything outside of that particular juxtaposition. And so the enemy beyond was of course, with Russia, the Soviet Union. And the enemy within was, was kind of fomented, pushed, strategized by a Wisconsin senator by the name of Joe McCarthy who built upon an already existing discomfort with communism and threw it up into, into scandalous extremist dimensions. And so he led a, literally a witch Hu across the United States, hunting for people who were associated with communism or any other left leaning ideology and had disconcertingly a large degree of success. This was in the arts, it was in journalism, it was in the academy, it was particularly in Hollywood where he was going about naming names and producing a whole list of punitive actions. People lost their jobs, people lost their careers, some people went to jail, some people committed suicide. It was a profoundly, profoundly disconcerting period in American history. And it all depended on this idea that there was somebody out there or somebody thing out there or some nation out there that was different from us, right? So that where we were good, they were bad, where we were moral, they were immoral, where we were honest, they were lying, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was kind of like a mirror image of each other. Each side saw the other as wrong, because, of course, the Russians or the Soviets were doing the same thing. Each side saw the other as wrong, each side saw the other's government as corrupt, and each side saw the other's public as ill served. Right? And so there it was, a very kind of neat system in which to make sure that enmity would be there as a way to structure and help us understand the news.
- [17:36]
B
Spring break isn't what it used to be. It's better this spring. Stay three nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. So enmity is a key part of this, then. What about invisibility? How does that play in.
- [17:58]
A
Yeah, so alongside invisible, alongside enmity, invisibility is also a marker of the Cold War and Cold War journalism. And invisibility is really about mixing up what is real and imagined, right? It's. It entails divorcing coverage from evidence. Because if you're going to mix up what's real and imagined, you don't have to really link a news story to any kind of fact or evidence. And in the Cold War, invisibility really meant that invisible wars could become real and real wars could become invisible. The war of ideas, which was the Cold War. I already said that the Cold War did not have the kind of evidence that we typically associate with wartime. It didn't have dead, it didn't have wounded, it didn't have structural devastation in the countries of the true protagonists. And so it was important to figure out how to get the population, the American people, to understand that we were at war. And this was incumbent not only, but primarily on journalism. The media needed to be able to show that invisible wars were real at the same time, however, that they needed to show that real wars become invisible. And of course, this is a reference to all the scores of proxy wars that were happening at the same time, where people were dying, where there was structural devastation, where there were victims and there was violence. And so what you have is you have these kind of. You have this kind of fantasy land, right, where the war of ideas gets treated as real and the proxy wars remain unseen. And the most explicit example of that, of course, is the Korean War. Right? The Korean War kind of came about and went away. I mean, it was already called the forgotten war within weeks of its ending. There was no real call to war. There was no explicit or admitted American involvement. There was not even a ceasefire. Right? And yet there was a real War. And we can go around the globe and we see all of the different places in which proxy wars were taking place. It's important to recognize that if things don't have to be visible to be treated as real, there's no limit, right? There's no limit to what can be imagined. There's no limit to what can be constructed. There's no limit to what can be claimed as the, the legitimating force for why we are actually doing what we're doing. And so all kinds of. And this is actually, it was around invisibility that. First of all, I want to say that invisibility works on enmity, right? Like there you, you, you, you identify your enemy, you go to war against them, you either make the war visible or you make, or you make it invisible, depending on what the objective is. But this is where we see an extraordinary use of images that are not photographs, right? Because photographs, there was nothing they could show. They couldn't really show the US and the USSR at war because there was not the available evidence for that. And they did, they didn't want to show and were told not to show photographs of what was going on in the proxy wars. The same goes with films or documentary, right? But what they could do is they could use the kinds of images that promised action, that fictionalized how we were going about prosecuting this war. And so you see maps, right? You see, one of my favorite examples is years before the Berlin Wall was erected, Life magazine actually did a double page spread in which it imagines what partitioning Berlin would look like. You also see an extraordinary amount of drawings, number of drawings that are playing with the idea of nuclear warfare, right? Because nuclear warfare is not something, you know, it's not something that we had typically experienced in the United States, at least not as targets. And so imagining the nuclear disaster takes the shape of all kinds of fictitious drawings because, of course, there are no photographs that can be taken of that either. The whole idea of containment, which is a very important policy during the Cold War, gets shown in maps, right? It gets cordoned off. We see it physically in our newspapers. So that the very medium, the very medium that depends on realistic images to show us what it looks like we are at war, is using fictionalized images or using images that approximate reality rather than depict it. And this, to me, was an extraordinary moment in which American journalism really gives up the fight.
- [23:37]
B
Those are two key ingredients. And of course, as you said, the way they work on each other. There is a third you discuss in the book. Can we add Outreach into this.
- [23:46]
A
Yes, outreach is. Outreach is really. I always say that this is actually the final closure of the Cold War mindset. Outreach is. Is basically a word for excessive proximity or cronyism, because outreach makes excessive proximity between journalists and the political or commercial figures around them. It makes it not only acceptable, but desirable. Right. And I had mentioned early on that one of the main dilemmas for American journalists was how to continue being a journalist, how to do their craft of newsmaking at the same time as they were being asked, quite forcibly, forcefully, to be a Cold Warrior. Right. So to support the Cold War effort, to enact the Cold War effort at the same time as they could remain independent journalists. And of course, that those are two goals that are completely antagonistic toward each other. But what it meant is that by the moment that journalists begin to
- [24:59]
B
take
- [25:00]
A
part in the Truman's campaign of truth or the crusade for freedom, all of these entities, the freedom radios, all these entities that Truman put in place to make sure that we could reach the other side. And the assumption was that by reaching the other side, we would make the other public. Right. The Russian people believe in the good of what we were doing. Right. So journalism had an objective. Journalists were given an aim to actually, to implement as a way of kind of finalizing the Cold War's prosecution. And I think it's easy to say that it wasn't just that journalists were critical for the Cold War's prosecution. I think that without the media, there would have been no Cold War. Right. So journalists, exception of this external intervention, as it came through with excessive proximity with sources. Right. The idea that both governmental and commercial entities had a right to kind of shape the news. They had a right to voice what they wanted in the news. They had a right to voice criticism and to censor the news. This took place across. Across the. The. The wide spectrum of news outlets at the time. I mean, people think that, you know, I mean, this is the moment at which, you know, the freedom radios give way to, you know, it's the voice of America, it's Radio Free Europe. It's. People think that this was only governmentally run. It was, in fact, governmentally run, but it was. It was populated by journalists from the commercial media. So you have journalists going back and forth between the commercial and governmental arms of the media environment. That completes the entrenchment of Cold War thinking because it seals journalists in the role of defining governmental or commercial objectives. You know, one of my favorite examples, not that it makes me happy, but I think it's so telling, is that the crusade for freedom which Truman launched as a means to support the Freedom Radios. And so the idea was that it was a kind of public appeal to American folks to give what they called truth dollars to donate to help set the Freedom Radios in place. But what people did not know is that the Freedom Radios were already completely financed. They were financed by the CIA. This was not made clear at the time. This was not admitted at the time. And it was, was so not non admissible that even journalists in news outlets were being asked to donate either their time or their funds or their resources to supporting the Freedom Radios without knowing that they had already been funded and of course, linked with the CIA. The Freedom Radios involved, you know, the government, it involved the Advertising Council, it involved the Free Europe Committee, it involved private advertising agencies in the news. So what you had is this very intricate but very secretive medley of players from both the political and the commercial realms playing out on the backs of journalism. And so journalism's acquiescence, right, in outreach, their agreement to be the figures that made this happen, to be the ones that would reach out not only abroad, but also there was domestic outreach going on. Right. The ability to explain why the Iron Curtain was a real thing, the ability to explain why American freedom was so important to support all of this kind of, it's mind boggling when we look back at it, but it offers a precedent that I think is, that is very sobering. And I do want to say that, you know, although this is really the, the, the, the great majority of, of American journalists were engaging in this. There were some who pushed back, but they were very few. Right. I mean, it's, it's Walter Lippman and it's, you know, it's Edward R. Murrow, it's, I have Stone, it's Drew Pearson who made repeated attempts to kind of pry open, you know, this, this complicit picture, but really not to much avail.
- [30:18]
B
Yeah, that is definitely important to add in. You mentioned some examples there. Can we talk further about what all of this means in terms of how Cold War conflicts were sort of covered and how we might see similar things happening in terms of how conflicts today are covered?
- [30:34]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, I would argue that all of these really actually are still with us. The enmity of the Cold War is absolutely the cornerstone of Trump's administration. And he has predicated his administration on this twinning of the enmity beyond. Right. The enemy beyond and the enemy within. He is, I think, a little bit more focused on the enemy within. As he has said, many times publicly. But the enemy within basically is really anybody who doesn't agree with him. And so if you've got anybody who doesn't agree with him, both on the. On the national side as well as on the international side. Right. Whether it's Venezuela or it's Iran or it's whomever. Right. Enmity, again, has become the. The kind of organizing principle for. For legitimating and sustaining America's place in the world. In much the same way that it happened in the 1950s, 1940s and 50s, it is happening again today. And so, you know, the notion that somehow we have learned to see people other than ourselves in more sensitive, more complete, more empathetic ways I think has been dashed to the ground by the enmity, the centrality of enmity that Trump has plays with. And I think it's also important to note that many of the same targets of enmity that came about during McCarthyism Trump is repeating. Right. I mean, the pushback on journalists then and now is extraordinarily historical. Right. It's a very rich parallel with what went on before. And yet it certainly seems to be resonating with a particular part of the population that sees enmity as the way to get out of the crisis in which we're are now lodged.
- [32:55]
B
So what do you hope readers most take away from all of this?
- [32:59]
A
Can I say something about invisibility and outrage?
- [33:03]
B
Of course.
- [33:03]
A
Okay. Invisibility, I think, you know, also is with us. And the best place that it's with us is the forever war that can't be seen. That's the global war on terror. Right. The Cold War taught journalists to hang in for the long run. Right. And like the Cold War, I think it's fair to say that the global war on terror, it kind of compiles battles from different places. It creates a shared category where they cohabit, and then it prosecutes them over years, even decades. And if we think about the kind of the spin from Al Qaeda to Al Shaba to Islamic State to isis, K. We can go on and on and on. It's like it's kind of, you know, dropping these new groups into the same category that allows us to continue what we have have been engaged with up until now. And we see journalism's complicity in this and journalism's lack of independence in the two most recent wars, or at least two of the most recent wars, and that's Ukraine and Gaza, whereby journalists are doing the bidding of the American government, they are doing the bidding of American commercial powers. And so the idea that somehow journalists will just hang around and report the war, but in a way that doesn't really ever see the war on its own terms, I think is one of the strongest examples of Cold War logic coming back to hit us in the face. The idea that somehow Cold War logic goes away would suggest that on all of these prisms, on all of these events, there would be some kind of media logic, some kind of journalistic frame of mind that would. That would present itself as understandable, as coherent, as in keeping with the events that journalists are describing. And that just has not happened.
- [35:34]
B
Well, clearly a lot then, to keep in mind going forward and kind of, you know, those of us who are not journalists, to be aware of, looking at what journalists come up with, and of course, those within journalism as well, to take this all into account. Is this the sort of thing you're continuing to work on? I don't know if you have any current projects, whether or not they're related, whether or not they're books. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [35:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, I'm hoping to work on secrecy because it's something that has bothered me for quite some time. Could I also just leave a note about. What I hope actually comes out of this book, I hope people will stay with people, is that the past does not disappear unless we deal with it. That the reason journalists and other American institutions are able to hang on to what they are, to the ways in which the Cold War was prosecuted and the logic by which it engaged journalism in a particular fashion. The reason that's even possible is because nobody's looking backward or not enough people are looking backward. And in order for journalists to understand this, there has to be some kind of understanding that goes across the political spectrum. What I call media left and media right in the book need to know that if one side is experiencing a particularly downturned moment, next time it will be the other side. And so whatever comes to media left now will come to media right at another moment. And if they don't discover and they don't try to work around the fact that they are all in this together, I don't see much chance for journalism moving forward.
- [37:31]
B
Well, lots to think about there. And of course, more in the book. So if anyone wants to read it, a reminder of the title, how the Cold War Broke the the Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline, published by polity in 2025. Barbie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:46]
A
Thank you. Thank you for. Sam.