This book explores Cold War journalism and journalists as threat, representing ‘enemy’ systems and ideologies. The book also examines Cold War aspirations of forging transnational journalistic connections across the Iron Curtain as well as finding common journalistic ground within the East and West blocs. The book shines a critical light on overly idealistic visions for that journalistic common ground, drawing on primary archival source material to investigate journalists and reporting work, journalistic content and journalistic venues during the Cold War era. This is not a book about traditional war correspondence – rather, it is about the rhetorical battles and the ideological fronts that have shaped and continue to shape our world. By fully understanding how journalism and journalists have intersected with hostile barriers and divisions in the past, we can have a more nuanced understanding of the current global media environment.

This is a study of the British state's generation, suppression and manipulation of news to further foreign policy goals during the early Cold War. Bribing editors, blackballing "e;unreliable"e; journalists, creating instant media experts through provision of carefully edited "e;inside information"e;, and exploiting the global media system to plant propaganda--disguised as news--around the world: these were all methods used by the British to try to convince the international public of Soviet deceit and criminality and thus gain support for anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad. Britain's shaky international position heightened the importance of propaganda. The Soviets and Americans were investing heavily in propaganda to win the "e;hearts and minds"e; of the world and substitute for increasingly unthinkable nuclear war. The British exploited and enhanced their media power and propaganda expertise to keep up with the superpowers and preserve their own global influence at a time when British economic, political and military power was sharply declining. This activity directly influenced domestic media relations, as officials used British media to launder foreign-bound propaganda and to create the desired images of British "e;public opinion"e; for foreign audiences. By the early 1950s censorship waned but covert propaganda had become addictive. The endless tension of the Cold War normalized what had previously been abnormal state involvement in the media, and led it to use similar tools against Egyptian nationalists, Irish republicans and British leftists. Much more recently, official manipulation of news about Iraq indicates that a behind-the-scenes examination of state propaganda's earlier days is highly relevant. John Jenks draws heavily on recently declassified archival material for this book, especially files of the Foreign Office's anti-Communist Information Research Department (IRD) propaganda agency, and the papers of key media organisations, journalists, politicians and officials. Readers will therefore gain a greater understanding of the depth of the state's power with the media at a time when concerns about propaganda and media manipulation are once again at the fore.

Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

How US government and media collaborated in their dissemination of Cold War propaganda.

Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in promoting the ideas and values of the Cold War. As they brought the foreign world to their Soviet and American readers, these journalists projected their own ideologies onto their reporting. In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents, Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting. Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds—to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms. Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

A personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the cold war and the early days of television news Marvin Kalb, the award-winning journalist who has written extensively about the world he reported on during his long career, now turns his eye on the young man who became that journalist. Chosen by legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to become one of what came to be known as the Murrow Boys, Kalb in this newest volume of his memoirs takes readers back to his first days as a journalist, and what also were the first days of broadcast news. Kalb captures the excitement of being present at the creation of a whole new way of bringing news immediately to the public. And what news. Cold War tensions were high between Eisenhower's America and Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Kalb is at the center, occupying a unique spot as a student of Russia tasked with explaining Moscow to Washington and the American public. He joins a cast of legendary figures along the way, from Murrow himself to Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt, and Daniel Schorr among many others. He finds himself assigned as Moscow correspondent of CBS News just as the U2 incident—the downing of a US spy plane over Russian territory—is unfolding. As readers of his first volume, The Year I Was Peter the Great, will recall, being the right person, in the right place, at the right time found Kalb face to face with Khrushchev. Assignment Russia sees Kalb once again an eyewitness to history—and a writer and analyst who has helped shape the first draft of that history.

The War Correspondent looks at the role of the war reporter today: the attractions and the risks of the job; the challenge of objectivity and impartiality in the war zone; the danger of journalistic independence being compromised by military control, censorship, and public relations; as well as the commercial and technological pressures of an intensely concentrated, competitive news media environment. This new edition substantially updates the original, ending with an extended section on the return of history and ideology to the reporting of international conflict, and interviews with prominent war and foreign correspondents including John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Mary Dvesky, and Alex Thomson.