THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 46-53
© 2001 National Communication Association

Televised Campaigns against Communism and Democracy: The Origins of Network-Government Collaboration in Making News

Lee Artz

Nancy E. Bernhard.  U. S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.  245 pages.  Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95. 

Nancy Bernhard’s contribution to the Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication inflicts another stunning blow to the myth of objective journalism and the democratic value of an unregulated, corporate-run media.  Based on extensive public affairs records, network and government officials’ papers, oral histories of policy makers and broadcasters, and a review of extant broadcast programs, Bernhard puts together a convincing case that from WWII through the early sixties, “network news divisions acted as unofficial state propagandists” (iii). 

Bernhard tells a tale of a “partnership between government information officers and network news producers” (2) beginning with revealing vignettes such as NBC’s World Spotlight, which was “thoroughly scripted and rehearsed” by State Department officials to give the “appearance of spontaneity” (77) and CBS’s Diplomatic Pouch where “accomplished and respected commentators suspended their professional autonomy” to set up the “perception of candidness” with seemingly “frank questions and answers” from well-rehearsed White House officials (88-89).  Throughout the post-war years, the National Association of Broadcasters and individual industry leaders, “repeatedly pledged their willingness to cooperate with the government in every feasible way” (98)–and the record shows that they delivered on their promises.

By the end of the 1950s, network desire for audience share and advertising revenue required an adjustment in the form of support to government policy.  Collaboration in news and documentary production carried over into more popular entertainment, advancing free market ideology for both broadcasting and foreign policy while effectively concealing government-network cooperation.  Indeed, “private industry performed an official function with no expense to the taxpayer and no threat of controversy over spending tax dollars to influence the public” (134).  Networks uniformly promoted American military supremacy, the need to arm the national security state, and the superiority of free market consumerism.

Producers and information officials believing that dramatic stories often conveyed their messages more effectively than documentary presentations invented a new television genre: the military drama.   Navy Log (CBS, ABC), West Point Story (CBS, ABC), Steve Canyon (NBC), and syndicated programs such as Citizen Soldier and The Silent Service were crafted from blending Navy and Army film footage and story lines with dramatic images of American heroes rescuing frightened anti-communist refugees, Christian symbols, and other Cold War propaganda (149-154).  Although challenging the ideological prerequisites of this programming, Bernhard grants networks some prerogative in this “fictional” genre, saving her most damning critique for the presumptions of network news journalism.

A chapter-long case study of NBC’s Meet the Press illustrates how “ideology became fully naturalized, or normalized, as objective” (155).  Meet the Press appears as an exemplar of the historical variant of objectivity wed to free market ideology and anticommunism.  The interview news program “claimed to represent the entire political spectrum on its panel of reporters” and “seemed to fulfill television’s democratic promise” of making government more accessible to the people.  During the 1950s, Meet the Press was well-received by the public (some 34 percent of the television audience tuned in) and the rest of the press (27 of 52 episodes in 1952 made the front page of the New York Times) (162-163).  Host Lawrence Spivak construed balance as aggressive policing of accepted ideology–ruling out any actual challenge to orthodoxy.  Almost imperceptibly “vigorous anticommunism” (165) and “corporate superiority” (176) became consistent with objectivity.   Only historical, analytical hindsight, provided here by Bernhard, uncovers the ideological trappings of network journalism.

Although she relates much of the story in the words of the protagonists, Bernhard’s almost-ethnographic retrospective on the post-war years does not dwell on individual malfeasance or action.  She identifies each event as an indicator of the cultural and institutional tendency towards an ideological certainty that justified propaganda, journalistic distortion, and other quite “unfree” communication practices–all done in the name of freedom.  In the process, Bernhard undermines claims for the inherent democratic thrust of media technology, reveals the political malleability of journalistic objectivity, and uncovers strong historical evidence of the incompatibility between a corporate-run media (which depends on and promotes self-interested ideology and practice) and democratic society (which depends on open debate and public access to information production and distribution).  This book thus joins those by Robert McChesney (1993), William Hoynes (1994), Douglas Kellner (1990), and others, which relate non-celebratory historical accounts of U. S. media and attend to the consequences for public discourse and cultural practice.

Bernhard proceeds through her historical documentation with break-neck speed as detail follows example, concluding that “network television news marginalized alternative voices” by equating corporate prerogatives with democratic processes (188-189).  The dramatic evidence presented in this remarkable little volume (less than 200 pages without notes) warrants further discussion, as well as more analysis and contextualization.  Several additional consequences can reasonably be culled from Bernhard’s offering.  For instance, the early years of television firmly established the reign of dominant thought as protocol–balance continues to be defined as debate within government/corporate defined parameters.  Witness media support for the U. S. invasion of Grenada (English, 1984) and Panama (Kieh, 1989), complicity during U. S. intervention in Nicaragua (Walker, 1991) and El Salvador (Solomon, 1992), and more recently, the cheerleading of major media accompanying the military press pool censorship during the Gulf War (Mowlana, Gerbner, and Schiller, 1992).  Washington Post publisher Martha Graham’s claim that democracy functions best when publishers keep government secrets from the public (Henwood, 1989) demonstrates that undemocratic cooperation between the media and the government remains “a thing people d[o]” (186).  Yet, media spokespeople continue to dismiss challenges to “credible” sources and normative “American” beliefs under the rubric of “objective journalism.”

Bernhard’s assessment could also be sharpened by defining and describing key analytical terms (such as hegemony, propaganda, and even the politically-leveling identifier “Americans”) and then employing them throughout the presentation.   Bernhard entices us with an announced “cultural hegemony” perspective for understanding why network-government collaboration was so successful (10) and ends by indicating that the meaning of her account “is an interpretive rather than scientific exercise” (178)–but the intervening narrative and the brief conclusion drops most hegemonic analysis.

There is room in this book to place the historical record in the context of cultural hegemony, to cast the discovered details of television network-government activity in their larger social landscape.  Bernhard suggests as much when she notes that “perhaps the most important cultural context to explore in understanding the acceptance of network-government collaborations to produce news are American attitudes toward capitalism itself” (59).  Indeed, more investigation of working and middle-class attitudes through the lens of cultural hegemony would further energize the account.

Anchoring the presentation with hegemony–understood as a contradictory social relationship based on consent to a dominant leadership providing some material, political, or cultural benefit to the subordinate–would help explain why capitalist propaganda “had to look like independently produced news” (18). The democratic proclivities of the U. S. working class fresh from WWII included their expectation of a rising standard of living along with a perceived right to select their government and its domestic and foreign policy.  Capitalist elites, organized in government and corporate institutions, including network television, sought to “lead” the American public, because they recognized that the social order functioned best (and only?) with broad citizen consent.  After all, Truman was there when FDR lost the battle against mineworkers and their successful national strike during WWII.  Industrialists still smarted from the labor movement of the late 1930s, which challenged capitalism, leading FDR to nationalize banks, establish social security, and make other necessary hegemonic adjustments to win back working class consent.  Bernhard’s narrative begins at the very apex of mass labor activity: national strikes in auto and steel (1945-1946) helped build the world’s largest labor organization–the 50 million-strong AFL-CIO, a power not to be treated lightly–and worthy of comment in a text on propaganda of the time.  In hegemonic terms, working class withdrawal of consent to the status quo could prove disastrous to corporations and their government representatives, better to provide leadership, benefits, and ideology for the American consumer.  Hegemony is negotiated most completely when subordinates speak the dominant language, which most likely occurs when subordinate needs are met by dominant practices and relations.  Thus, as government and network sources themselves indicated, elite preference for consensual, hegemonic rule required that propaganda appear as independent, impartial news. 

Fortunately for government and network officials, the post-war economic boom provided dramatic material benefits for millions of Americans, carrying the necessary ideological “evidence”of the superiority of “free enterprise,” widely identified as a marker of the American way of life.  Moreover, this consumer-based ideological consensus accepted the silencing of alternative voices: the 1948 Smith Act was used to jail socialist trade unionists, corporate black-listing enforced compliance or unemployment, and the media-entertainment industry shut out non-conforming creative artists.  Bernhard could dramatically clarify the suffocating nature of anticommunist rhetoric by noting such coercion and mentioning, even in passing, the efforts of a few notable free speech advocates, such as I. F. Stone, Dalton Trumbo, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, contributors to The Nation, Dissent, or the post-war socialist press, for example.  Despite attempts to eliminate opposition, oppositional voices reappeared  within years of the period Bernhard investigates.  Hegemony ruptures over civil rights, Vietnam, and gender inequality–indicating that any hegemony, even one as solid as that in the 1950s, faces contradictions and tensions that continually challenge elite interests and explanations.

In short, Bernhard’s findings should be placed in the context of a larger domestic consensus engineered through major hegemonic institutions that  rewarded adherents and isolated resistors, setting the parameters of acceptable discourse within the confines of anticommunism.  Television news and military dramas paralleled other elite communication activity from electoral campaigns, legislative initiatives, and economic education programs to movies, local civic affairs, and public relations campaigns in factories and churches.  And as Kellner (1990) documents, network broadcasting also represented and replenished hegemony in shows as diverse as I Led Three Lives, Dragnet, and I Love Lucy.

Media promotion of anticommunist objectivity also makes more sense in its international context.  American allies in Europe had joined the socialist camp (often expropriating American businesses) or were flirting with socialism and charging cultural imperialism.  Meanwhile in Latin America, Asia, and Africa unappreciative populations were increasingly disrupting corporate profits, challenging U. S. political directives, and developing their own nationalist agendas–often punctuated with dramatic actions, such as Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the Vietnamese revolution.

Institutional collaboration massaged the workings of capitalist hegemony according to the social relations on the ground.  In the 1950s, Europe was given the Marshall Plan to rebuild capitalism, as networks touted U. S. capitalism’s magnanimity and superiority.  Outside Europe, American corporate interests were protected more coercively.  Bernhard’s single example of media cooperation with CIA activity in Greece in 1948 (180-184) needs to be supplemented.  Certainly, government-network collaboration was (and is) so extensive that one could not hope to cover every situation in a single book, but the U. S. invasion of Lebanon (1958) or its role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and “counter-insurgency” campaigns elsewhere might better illustrate that, rather than government officials seeking influence over the industry, media have consistently demanded a foreign policy that protects U. S. (corporate) interests around the globe.

A more thorough hegemonic analysis might keep Bernhard from slipping from the clarity of her research as she struggles to maintain an artificial dichotomy between “the national security state and the television networks” (189), contradicting the preponderance of evidence uncovered.  What antagonism exists between corporations and their government representatives if their separation is nothing more than a “revolving door of business advisors to government” with representatives alternating so frequently that it “became positively dizzying” (25)?  Bernhard assembles examples that G. William Domhoff would envy, but elides the obvious conclusion: class leaderships direct all hegemonic institutions, varying in their social tasks and occasionally disagreeing on the preferred negotiations with the subordinate, but united in protecting what Gramsci calls the economic “kernel” of capitalism.  As Bernhard relates so well, advertisers volunteered (21-23), networks provided “innovative cooperation” (97), and newspaper and broadcasting executives adopted a voluntary censorship code (105) not because they acquiesced, or even because they simply supported U. S. foreign policy.  American corporations, including the television industry, advocated U. S. economic expansion and military deployment as a means to protect “the American Way of Life” (23).  Simultaneously, the FCC, Congress, and the White House favored corporate networks as keepers of the “free marketplace of ideas.” 

By making more consistent interpretations based on her chosen frame of cultural hegemony,  Bernhard’s work–which makes an invaluable contribution to mass communication history–could rival Kellner’s (1990) appraisal of cultural hegemony in television, Deetz’s (1992) observations on the demise of democracy in a corporate culture, and McChesney’s (1993) critique of government support to commercial broadcasting.

Lee Artz is associate professor of communication at Loyola University of Chicago.

Works Cited

Deetz, Stanley A.  Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.

English, Raymond, ed.  The Grenada Mission: Crisis Editorializing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times.  Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1984.

Henwood, Doug.  “The Washington Post” Extra!  (1989):   Jan.-Feb. 1990. The Washington Post: The Establishment's Paper. EXTRA! pp. 11-13.

Hoynes, William.  Public Televison for Sale: Media, the Market, and the Public Sphere.  Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.

Kellner, Douglas.  Televison and the Crisis of Democracy.  Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990.

Kieh, George Klay, Jr.  “Propaganda and United States Foreign Policy: The Case of Panama.”  Political Communication 7.2 (1990): 61-72.

McChesney, Robert W.  Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U. S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Mowlana, Hamid, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller, eds. Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf.  Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.

Solomon, William S.  “News Frames and Media Packages Covering El Salvador.”  Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9  (1992): 56-74

Walker, Thomas W.  Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua.  Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991.