218 The Propaganda War
32.4.4: The Propaganda War
Soviet propaganda was disseminated through tightly controlled media outlets in the Eastern Bloc. The U.S. tried to counter this with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc by providing an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press.
Learning Objective
Give examples of propaganda used by both parties to the Cold War
Key Points
- Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. Radio and television organizations were typically state-owned while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly the local communist parties, and was largely used for disseminating propaganda against capitalism and the West.
- State and party ownership of print, television, and radio media was used to control information and society in light of Eastern Bloc leaderships viewing even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat to the bases underlying Communist power therein.
- Circumvention of dissemination controls occurred to some degree through samizdat (underground publications produced and disseminated by hand) and limited reception of western radio and television broadcasts.
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government-funded broadcasting organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries “where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed,” and was used especially during the Cold War as a counter to communist propaganda and controlled media in the Eastern Bloc.
- RFE played a critical role in Cold War-era Eastern Europe; unlike government-censored programs, RFE publicized anti-Soviet protests and nationalist movements, influencing major events such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Key Terms
- propaganda
- Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view; the psychological mechanisms of influencing and altering the attitude of a population toward a specific cause, position or political agenda in an effort to form a consensus to a standard set of beliefs.
- samizdat
- A key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
- A United States government-funded broadcasting organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East “where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed.”
Overview
Media in the