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U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960. By Nancy E. Bernhard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xix + 245 pp. Bibliography, .illustrations, notes, and tables. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN 0-521-59415-4.
Reviewed by Alan Nadel
From its outset, television staked in the American imagination a unique claim on veracity, which emanated from its capacity to broadcast "live" and to support its assertions with visible "proof" Television's combined claims on the immediate and the visual thus empowered its capacity for effective propaganda in ways, initially, that were widely sensed rather than fully comprehended. In tracking the relation between U.S. television news and cold war propaganda, therefore, Nancy Bernhard is, among other things, demonstrating the symbiosis between government and the broadcast press that helped television realize its potential for commercially successful propagandizing.
The power of propaganda, of course, correlates directly to its invisibility, that is, its ability to disappear beneath the veil of "truth." During the height of the cold war, moreover, American "truth" comprised a very narrowly construed and pervasively deployed consensus. The strategy of "containment," as originally articulated by George Kennan, charged all American citizens with the task of checking the spread of Communism through a combination of vigilance and self-scrutiny that would produce a homogeneously attractive image of American life. Because the cold war was being fought for hearts and minds, on a chiefly symbolic battleground, the ability to deliver and solidify images in some ways proved more effective than any form of hardware. The principle of "deterrence," for example, depended on the symbolic value of planes, missiles, and nuclear warheads.
In this light, television was indeed the business of cold war policy to the degree that...