Back to Results
Cover image of Cold War Correspondents
Cover image of Cold War Correspondents
Share this Title:

Cold War Correspondents

Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines

Dina Fainberg

Publication Date
Binding Type

Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in promoting the ideas and values of the Cold War. As they brought the foreign world to their Soviet and American readers, these journalists projected their own ideologies onto their reporting.

In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents, Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists...

Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in promoting the ideas and values of the Cold War. As they brought the foreign world to their Soviet and American readers, these journalists projected their own ideologies onto their reporting.

In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents, Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting.

Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds—to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms.

Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

Reviews

Reviews

In this extraordinarily thorough and insightful study, Fainberg identifies the similar approaches and practices used by Soviet and U.S. foreign correspondents reporting from each other's countries during the Cold War.

The research for this book is impressive.

This ambitious, innovative book reveals the inner mechanisms of ideology as well as propagandistic constructions on both sides of the ideological 'frontlines' between East and West. Dina Fainberg provides a fresh new angle on the topic; her conclusions are well elaborated, thought out, and very convincing.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
376
ISBN
9781421438443
Illustration Description
28 halftones, 3 line drawings
Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration
Introduction. A Battle of Words

Part One. Spiers versus Liars, 1945-1953
Chapter 1. Making "Soviet Restons"
Chapter 2. The Heralds of Truth

Part Two. Pens instead of Projectiles

Note on Transliteration
Introduction. A Battle of Words

Part One. Spiers versus Liars, 1945-1953
Chapter 1. Making "Soviet Restons"
Chapter 2. The Heralds of Truth

Part Two. Pens instead of Projectiles, 1953-1965
Chapter 3. Overtake America
Chapter 4. In Sputnik's Shadow

Part Three. Your Fight Is Our Fight, 1965-1985
Chapter 5. Notes from the Rotten West
Chapter 6. Reports from the Backward East

Part Four. A Moment of Truth? 1985-1991
Chapter 7. Cold War Correspondents Confront Old and New Thinking 00

Conclusion. Us and Them

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Archives
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Dina Fainberg

Dina Fainberg is an assistant professor of modern history at City University of London. She is the coeditor of Reconsidering Stagnation: Ideology and Exchange in the Brezhnev Era.