Media and the Cold War in the 1980s: Between Star Wars and Glasnost

Description

The Cold War was a media phenomenon. It was a daily cultural political struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people-and for government leaders, a struggle to undermine their enemies' ability to control the domestic public sphere. This collection examines how this struggle played out on screen, radio, and in print from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a time when breaking news stories such as Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program and Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost captured the world's attention. Ranging from the United States to the Soviet Union and China, these essays cover photojournalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Polish punk, Norwegian film, Soviet magazines, and more, concluding with a contribution from Stuart Franklin, one of the creators of the iconic "Tank Man" image during the Tiananmen Square protests. By investigating an array of media actors and networks, as well as narrative and visual frames on a local and transnational level, this volume lays the groundwork for writing media into the history of the late Cold War. Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Introduction: Mapping the Role of the Media in the Late Cold War (Henrik G. Bastiansen, Martin Klimke, Rolf Werenskjold)....Pages 1-17 Selling “Star Wars” in American Mass Media (William M. Knoblauch)....Pages 19-42 Interviewing the Enemy and Other Cold War Players: US Foreign Policy as Seen Through Playboy During the Reagan Years (Laura Saarenmaa)....Pages 43-61 Going Atmospheric and Elemental: Roger Moore’s and Timothy Dalton’s James Bond and Cold War Geo-Politics (Klaus Dodds, Lisa Funnell)....Pages 63-85 Civil Cold War Aviation as Television Drama: The Popular Miniseries Treffpunkt Flughafen (GDR 1986) (Tobias Hochscherf)....Pages 87-113 Photojournalism East/West: The Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the Trade of Photographs (Annette Vowinckel)....Pages 115-135 Irony in Polish Punk of the 1980s as a Form of Contestation (Anna G. Piotrowska)....Pages 137-159 Mediating Alternative Culture: Two Controversial Exhibitions in Hungary During the 1980s (Juliane Debeusscher)....Pages 161-188 The Cold War Reporters: The Norwegian Foreign-News Journalists and Foreign-News Correspondents, 1945–1995 (Jan Fredrik Hovden, Rolf Werenskjold)....Pages 189-221 Orions Belte: The Birth of the Norwegian “High-Concept” Movie in the Shadow of the Second Cold War (Bjørn Sørenssen)....Pages 223-234 Reporting Glasnost: The Changing Soviet News in a Norwegian Daily, 1985–1988 (Henrik G. Bastiansen)....Pages 235-262 Revolution as Memory: The “History Boom” on Late Socialist Television (Sabina Mihelj, Simon Huxtable)....Pages 263-282 Power and the Body: Images of the Leaders in Soviet Magazines During the Cold War (Ekaterina Vikulina)....Pages 283-310 The Iconic Photograph and Its Political Space: The Case of Tiananmen Square, 1989 (Stuart Franklin)....Pages 311-338 Back Matter ....Pages 339-346