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theses

The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States featured the media as one of the most carefully calibrated weapons. Acrimonious editorials, venomous cartoons, and scathing reports on each side proclaimed that it held the key to universal happiness and castigated the rival’s ideology. This dissertation explores the contribution of Soviet and American international reporting to the production of ideology and politicization of everyday life in the Cold War era. It follows the lives and work of Soviet and American journalists who served as resident correspondents covering the rival superpower for news agencies at home between 1945 and 1985. Foreign correspondents and their reports shaped the popular imagination and the political horizons of the Cold War in important ways. As gifted storytellers, these journalists were able to relate life observed on the other side of the Iron Curtain in ways that resonated with the ideological sensibilities of their domestic audiences. Readers appreciated the professional expertise of foreign correspondents and their accessible style. As a result, ordinary people on both sides adopted journalistic reports as guidelines for their own views of the adversary overseas. This dissertation compares and contrasts the different ways that ideology influenced the journalists’ sense of self and their writings about the rival superpower. International reporting on both sides combined a projection of Soviet or American culture onto the foreign world with the personal interests and convictions of individual journalists. Professional duty demanded that the journalists immerse themselves into their nations’ ultimate “other,” make that other intelligible for their compatriots, all the while resisting the “other’s” ideological temptations. Foreign correspondent simultaneously occupied the position of an insider and an outsider, and travelled across boundaries of culture, customs, and worldviews on a daily basis. The ideological prism helped the journalists as they struggled to understand the Cold War adversary and to make their experience overseas meaningful. The foundational ideas of the period thus became deeply intertwined with the subjectivity of individual correspondents and their reporting. This study is the first comparative investigation of Soviet and American international reporting and its contribution to the legitimation of Cold War ideology. Only with the end of the Cold War is it possible to see how the news media and their correspondents on each side were shaped by different sets of ideological convictions and at the same time contributed to the continued elaboration of those creeds.

ETD_4329

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Dina Fainberg

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000066738

doi:10.7282/T3SX6BZH

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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