Lingering Anti-communism
-- Analysis of News Coverage of the 2007 China’s National People’s Congress in the
New York Times and the Washington Post.
As long as anticommunism provided the rationalization for U.S. foreign policy,
American media provided the international vehicle for the official dissemination of
that message (Alexandre, p21). After 70 years of media’s counterthrust against the
Red Menace via television, motion pictures, radio, balloons, leaflets, and secret
presses, anticommunism is widely considered significantly muted after the fall of the
Soviet Union and Eastern bloc communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe
between 1989 and 1991. However, close examination of current American media
barely reveals that the counterthrust against communism is abating. Anticommunism,
which was overtly manifested and propagated in mass media, has nowadays become a
latent decree underlying the ways that American media deal with socialist countries.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent open up a
critique of American media which they believe tend to marginalize dissent and allow
the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the
public by means of five filters. One of these filters is anticommunism. Communism
has been deemed as ultimate evil that has always been the specter haunting property
owners, threatening the very root of capitalism. As a way to counter the effect of
communism, publicizing abuses of Communist states in American media has
contributed to elevating opposition to communism, defending the state’s prevailing
ideology (Chomsky and Herman, p29).
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