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  • The Limits of the Cold War Analogy
  • Anna McCarthy (bio)

What is the value of seeing the accommodationist stance of media organizations in today's political landscape through the lens of the Cold War? Where do the Cold War analogies, as opposed to a strong focus on the differences between then and now, or on how what happened then led us to where we are now, get us? There is no denying that a strangely reminiscent yet strangely contemporary interface exists between the U.S. government and mainstream televisual media today. On the one hand, people are proclaiming that network TV journalism is irrelevant, a claim bolstered by the rise of pundit-oriented political coverage on cable networks. On the other hand, the Cold War-era prestige and hegemony that still attach to networks play a crucial role in the Bush administration's political strategy. Consider the recent handling of former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay's disclosure that faulty intelligence was the basis of George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. There was something anachronistic, but also very contemporary and canny, in the decision to have national security adviser Condoleeza Rice defend the administration's warmongering on all three network morning shows in the last week of January 2004.

It was a Cold War-era media strategy insofar as it seemed to say: "The American people can see how seriously the administration is taking the charge of warmongering. A key government official is going to answer questions on all three networks!" The use of "all three" networks in official rhetoric today always reminds me that the "end of the network era" (if we date it with the founding of the Fox Network) coincides roughly with the putative end of the Cold War.

When leaders evoke the bygone days of network news hegemony, the reference seems calculated to trade on the aura of that period in news history, an aura that resurfaced recently in Errol Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003), during which the stately theme music of a CBS Reports broadcast on McNamara plays on the soundtrack. The scattered snorts of derision in the audience when I saw the film in New York City suggested that the self-importance of network television in that period is now a campy artifact. [End Page 121]

But Rice's appearance on the morning news shows was also utterly contemporary. Not simply a civilian defense intellectual, she is a black woman with a story. Rice got to address the nation and answer questions about the possibility that war was waged and many thousands of lives lost on the basis of a hunch, but she did not have to face professional journalists. Instead, she spoke to a daytime audience composed primarily of women. Although I was very glad to see the imagined collectivity of female TV viewers cast as opinion makers, if only disingenuously, I was also aware that this public relations strategy enabled the Bush administration to appear "touchy-feely," open, and supremely unaccountable all at the same time. The newspapers, obliged to report on Rice's appearance, quoted primarily from scripted remarks. Her appearance was only the latest of many instances in which, as numerous commentators have noted, the administration has manipulated a seemingly quiescent media.1

If Rice's national address on network TV was reminiscent of Cold War-era media politicking, it was definitely updated with a postfeminist twist that benefited the Bush administration. This state of affairs suggests that to understand this historical moment in U.S. media and, more important, to build a critique based on this understanding, the Left should consider its Cold War analogies carefully. Although they are often disturbingly apt, I am not convinced that they are the most useful pathways for action. For one, although they certainly open up a space for outrage, they are dangerously recuperable by the Right. While preparing this essay, I obtained a copy of Ann Coulter's Treason.2 Coulter herself likes to compare the Cold War to the present day, but not, obviously, to spur awareness of how constitutional freedoms and international law are regularly violated by the U.S. government...

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