Rolf Werenskjold

Henrik G. Bastiansen

The Cold War between the East and West during the period 1945-1991 was a rivalry where the world's doom constantly emerged as a possible result. It was global and included northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in different ways. Historians are still discussing how Cold War history should be understood in these countries, but they have rarely been concerned about mass media and communications. Meanwhile, many media scholars have neglected the theme entirely. In this book, these two areas of knowledge are combined in new research on the Nordic mass media, and their significance during the Cold War. A number of controversial topics are covered. Nineteen Nordic scholars sheds new light on Nordic print media in all four countries, but also write about radio and the television broadcasting. Extending the traditional Cold War research on media and communication to include sport, magazines for men, political cartoons, and films, the book lays the foundation for Cold War studies to become an integrated interdisciplinary field of knowledge, and a more central part of the Nordic media research than before - with countless opportunities for exciting new research, with high relevance to world conflicts in our own time.

The Nordic Media and the Cold War

Martin Klimke

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.

Henrik G. Bastiansen

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