Essay On Propaganda In The Cold War

Propaganda in the Cold War

Both the East and the West made propaganda during the Cold War. Two of the major powerhouses were the USSR under Stalin and the United States under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and H. W. Bush. The western propaganda machine used many different outlets as a means to spread their opinion. The eastern machine was very much censored unlike that of the West. Both were managed by the state in some way or another.

The West used propaganda for the defense of the western view of economic and military interest. The propaganda from the West was also used for fear. In the U.S. and other western countries, there was a thing called the “Red Scare.” The U.S. machine made sure that Red Scare campaigns went up on nearly every media platform that existed. Some of the western propaganda machines took a different approach. Machines such as America, the BBC, and Vatican Radio wanted to project the

positive aspects of the West into the minds of those in the USSR.
The eastern propaganda machine, or better yet the Soviet machine, was controlled beyond belief by the state. Not many people expected it to take a watch dog position either. A watch dog position is that of someone who is willing look past the headline and go even farther for information from the people responsible. The Soviets also liked to find other world issues to distract the population with. The Soviets didn’t want their own population to find out that they themselves might be twisted. One such distraction was the Rosenberg case. Communist parties around the world started to back them in their defense. The case was an American case that they believed they had been accused wrongly in. The Rosenbergs were set for death row and several people worldwide tried to stop it. Part of the reason that the USSR was able to use things like this, is because the KGB, or the Russian spy network, had people all over the world feeding information back to Moscow. Russia was behind in technology so their spies were greatly valued. The KGB also instructed their propaganda writers on what to write, showing once again a major amount of censorship.
In both cases propaganda was produced by the state but the West had a little more creative license and freedom on it.

The main goal of propaganda was to produce public support. It succeeded mainly because of the media platforms. Propaganda came in the forms of posters, radio broadcast, TV of all sorts and movies. Some of these platforms, however, were only available to the West. Propaganda also worked to eliminate domestic sympathy for the enemy and any resistance to the war. Each side tried to denature the other as inferior. They wanted their own people to see them as the good guys and the enemy as the bad guys.

All propaganda produced some effect whether it be fear or support. Without it, the Cold War probably wouldn’t have succeeded. The Western propaganda machine had multiple outlets of propaganda so it could constantly hit the public with anti-Communism displays. The Eastern propaganda machine was more selective with what was allowed. Both, however, had the same goals and both sides succeeded in those

goals.