In the early years of the Cold War, American journalism helped construct a world defined by enemies, uncertainty, and invisible threats. That framework didn’t disappear; it became embedded in how news is produced, interpreted, and trusted. In this episode of News Over Noise, Matt Jordan and Cory Barker talk with Barbie Zelizer about her book How the Cold War Broke the News and the enduring influence of Cold War logic on contemporary journalism. Drawing on decades of research, Zelizer examines how ideas like objectivity, balance, and access were shaped in a moment of geopolitical tension and how those same assumptions continue to structure coverage today.
Special thanks to our guest:
Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, crisis, culture, memory and images. She has authored/edited fifteen books and 200 articles/essays. Recipient of multiple fellowships, including the American Academy of Arts and Science, the British Academy and the European Academy, her work has appeared in national and global media. Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, she is past President of the International Communication Association. Her most recent book is the forthcoming How the Cold War Broke the News (Polity, 2025).
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
CORY BARKER: In the early years of the Cold War, American newspapers were filled with stories about enemies. Most readers would never see. Communist infiltration. Foreign influence. Threats operating just beneath the surface. Often there was little concrete evidence, but the framing was clear. The danger was everywhere, even if it remained invisible. That way of covering the world didn't disappear when the Cold War ended. It became routine, a default logic for making sense of conflict, power and politics. And decades later, it still shapes what counts as news who gets trusted, and which stories feel urgent or safely ignorable. Today, journalism is often described as being in decline. Audiences are shrinking. Trust is eroding, and coverage of democratic backsliding frequently feels muted, normalized, or oddly disconnected from the stakes. We tend to blame technology, polarization, or bad actors. But what if journalism also helped build the conditions that made this moment possible?
MATT JORDAN: That's the argument at the center of How the Cold War Broke the News, a new book by Barbie Zelizer. She traces the current crisis in journalism back to the Cold War era assumptions about enmity, objectivity, access and authority, and shows how these assumptions still shaped the new routines today, often in ways journalists don't fully recognize. Dr. Zelizer is a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores how journalism construct meaning, memory and authority, and how those constructions can both inform the public and finally limit what journalism is able to see. Barbie Zelizer, welcome to News Over Noise.
BARBIE ZELIZER: Great to be here.
MATT JORDAN: We were both really thrilled to read your book because it really kind of resonated on so many levels. So how many of the things that we are seeing today start in the Cold War?
BARBIE ZELIZER: I don't think there's anything that we're seeing today that doesn't start from the Cold War. I feel that the Cold War is at the heart of all of our ills. It is not only, I mean, this is a book about American journalism, obviously, but it's in every American institution. I think that our institutional culture is bred on the Cold War, relies on the Cold War, and pivots toward the Cold War whenever we have things in our public space, right, that are troubling or unexpected or just dangerous.
MATT JORDAN: Some of the things you identify, things like jingoism and sensationalism, those existed long before the Cold War. But what is it about the Cold War that kind of bakes these things into the system?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Right. What I argue the Cold War mindset does is it builds on a number of traits that were in journalism forever, like you say, jingoism, patriotism, exceptionalism, ethnocentrism, all the isms. Right? That really kind of limit journalists capacity to be autonomous. What happens during the Cold War, of course, is that the Cold War posits before journalists a really central question, which is, how can you be an independent, autonomous journalist at the same time that you are being tasked with reporting in and of and about Cold War realities? And so, what happens here is that there has to be a certain kind of entrenchment that takes these things, these aspects of news making that existed far before the Cold War. And, and, and uses them in the service of Cold War aims. And so, I argue that it is the particular reality of the Cold War, the fear, the acquiescence, the secrecy, the image making, the lying right that, that allow Cold War warriors, right? The Cold War thinkers to use the media, to their own aims.
CORY BARKER: Yeah. If we step back for one second, you note in the preface of the book that as you were working on this for about a decade, your title evolved from How the Cold War Anticipates to Shapes to Drives to then eventually Broke the News. How did those changes, in just terminology, sort of reflect how your thoughts about this situation and this history sort of evolved over that period as you've been working on the book?
BARBIE ZELIZER: I remember when I first started thinking about the Cold War as my, as the topic of my next book, it was right around the time that Putin came into the public eye, at least, the interna— the global audience that was attending to what was going on in Russia at that time. And I remember thinking, oh my God, like, this is history repeated over and over, and people aren't really noticing, right? How much this is comparable to what went on in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But it was really as he ascended and as things in our political environment descended that they began to meet each other on the terms that I had been looking at, in terms of the Cold War itself. And the interesting thing is that, I mean, those titles clearly reflect, you know, a kind of descent into mad, mad madness, you know, because, like, there's nothing left at this point in my view, that isn't Cold War driven. But, you know, one could argue of and, one a small aside I will make, is that I think that the Trump administration today, has a rather, skilled set of historians on its staff because much of what Trump does is really Cold War point two. Right? It's really examples that are drawn from the Cold War. He uses the Cold War as a precedent. But he's not the only one. Right? I mean, I've argued that what happens is since the Cold War ended, whenever things kind of, you know, get jumbled up, it's the Cold War patterning that we fall back on to because it's familiar, because it worked. Or at least we thought it worked. And that's why, right? It's so hard to get rid of.
MATT JORDAN: One of the things you talk about is the kind of normalization of autocratic leadership, right? That started to really kind of get baked in during the Cold War. And we talk a lot about in the, you know, as we look at the press now about, sanewashing and all the things that, that go along with Trump. How does that start to happen in the McCarthy era that that the sort of autocratic leadership starts to get normalized in the press?
BARBIE ZELIZR: Right. Well, so there were, I argue that there are three markers that kind of drive Cold War consciousness. One is the notion of enmity. Right? This idea that the world is always divided between us and them. And us, we are always on the good side, right? And they are always on the bad side. So, if we're moral, they're amoral. If we're democratic, they're communist. If we are, if we are productive, they are stale. Right? So, there's a kind of, symmetry that goes along, building on this notion of enmity by which both, sides see the other as bad. As, the other's government as ill-advised. And the other's public as ill-served. So, there's a kind of parallelism that kind of drives through, thinking about enmity that kind of crystallizes exactly how autocracy begins to come around. And it's enmity both within and beyond, right? It's enmity beyond, which is, of course, is this, war of ideas between the United States and the Soviet Union? But the enmity within is tracking, corralling, punishing, diminishing, eliminating, anybody who had who could get caught, right? In the webs of this Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy, around support or so-called support for communism, for liberalism, for socialism, for a lot of isms, right, that were not part of the American way of life as it was then seen. The interesting thing about the media and McCarthyism is they never really did their job. Journalists were way off mark. They treated McCarthy as he arose. I mean, of course, McCarthy targeted the media. He targeted the entertainment industry. He targeted academics. Not so different from where we are today. Right? So, there's a clear parallel there. But as they were targeting him, as they were being targeted, they pushed back, on, on, McCarthy by simply treating him as a joke. Right? Not at all. Not at all. The kind of efficient, defense that one wants for one's, for one's, freedom of opinion or freedom of the press. And they, you know, they literally called him names like Dipsy Doodle Ball. And it wasn't just individual journalists; it was the institutions and organizations that were involved in journalism. So, you have things like editor and publisher, you know, you know, saying that, you know, this was a this was a way over-reported story at the time. And so, journalists did not rise to the occasion. They, they did everything that we see being done now in the face of autocracy point two, right? Which is, you know, sanewashing, which is using vague language, which is acquiescing right to whatever is going on in hopes that you can remain a player in the game. I mean it's using euphemism, right? It's using qualification in your language. So, all of the things that we have seen in, in the Trump administration, one and two, right, is classic, journalistic behavior that we saw during McCarthyism. So, you know, the question of how to fight autocracy, we know. There are enough people telling us, right? There are enough people who are outside of our closed system or our closed belief system who can say, you know, get your get your act together, right, start, start, start putting things in their right place. Start understanding things the way they need to be understood if we're going to diminish this threat. But journalists really are not listening, and I and they weren't listening then. Right? And even though there were, there were people. Right. You know, Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, you know, I. F. Stone. I mean, they were all pushing back over and over and over again, but you can only push back so, so far. Right? If nobody is really picking it up. And what you had is on the individual level, on the organizational level, on the institutional level, you had such a kind of consensual, even unarticulated decision that they were not going to make big waves. And so, they didn't. And it wasn't journalists, sorry, that actually took, McCarthy down. Right? It was it was that it was the house. Right? It was the Army-McCarthy hearings. Right? So, you can't you almost can't make this up like this. McCarthyism was a horrible failing for American journalism by any means, by any judgment call. And here we are again.
CORY BARKER: To that point, as you were talking there, I was just thinking about not only, you know, the parallels between the Cold War era and sort of the Trump regime, but just thinking about news organizations and journalists failing and then maybe not really addressing those failures or making some sort of real, credible apology, even during, you know, the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and the way in which a lot of mainstream news organizations helped launder the, you know, myth about weapons of mass destruction and things like that. How do you feel like news organizations and journalists have, you know, dealt with their own failures since the Cold War, whether that is, you know, specific apologies or sort of public, you know, reconsiderations of what they did. And now we're going to cover it this way because we do see a lot of that kind of conversation, especially in the lead up to elections or after someone's elected about, you know, maybe we could have covered it this way or the next time we're going to cover it that way. But it still feels often like a sort of cycle of failure. And then, we'll get them next time. Right? And, you know, we talk so much on the show about trust, obviously, and the public trust in the media. And I think that approach and the way you're talking about it here certainly contributes to a lack of trust and credibility that the American public has towards this news organization. So, the any thoughts on that as far as how they, the news organizations have handled those failures since the Cold War?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Not well.
CORY BARKER: Yeah.
BARBIE ZELIZER: I think I think one of the most important things that we know right about any institution, any organization, any occupation is if they don't clean house, right, nobody else is going to clean it for them. Right. And so, and this is why, for me, the Cold War is such a powerful and disturbing corollary, because if you didn't clean your act up, then, I mean, look, there were there were journalists, there were there were many, kind of media criticism, criticism outlets. You know, who that after the fact, you know, talked about the media's response to McCarthyism as one of the most shameful periods in American media history. But that was after the fact, right. And so, you would think that in being after the fact, it would force journalists, to look inside and to say, well, what is it that we were doing, right, that allowed this to go ahead? And I don't think there has been the kind of, you know, there was a very short-lived kind of, you know, a decade later, oh, this is why this happened, right? We didn't interpret. We tried to be so objective. We tried to be so balanced, but we're still trying to be so objective, trying to be so balanced, looking at perspective as it is, as if it's a swear word. Right. I mean, this is this is for me is one of the really one of the, the main points is that we have. So, we have so diminished our, our respect for having an opinion. Right? We have so separated it out of American news making that we are left with values that don't really match how we engage with things in the world. And so, at some level, it's almost like, you know, journalists have done this to themselves. And if journalists had done this to themselves, they have to get themselves out of this rut. But in order to get themselves out, they absolutely have to see. And I think that it is the absence of the Cold War parallel now. I mean, in some places, you see, you hear it, Cold War two, you know, you know, Cold War again on us, you know, but not by and large, and certainly not by and large in the way that it would push, practitioners to kind of think again, push editors and publishers, right, and executives to kind of say, we made this mess and we need to get out of it. And if we look at what's happening in the media now, you know, it's so easy to point, you know, to political pressures. It's so easy to point to, you know, to economic pressures, legal pressures. I mean, they're coming fast and furious, right? The news media are not in a good situation. But if we do not look at the craft of journalism to begin with, it's going to happen again. It's going to keep happening until journalism is gone.
MATT JORDAN: One of the phrases it used to think about the dynamic you're talking about is pack journalism. So how does that how would, a journalist who, you know, we would want to be autonomous, get pulled into the pack? What would you describe what that process might look like?
BARBIE ZELIZER: As a former wire service reporter, I always have to, like, pause when I hear somebody ask that question in the sense that that journalists are pack animals. Like, we want to believe that every journalist is out there thinking autonomously, being creative, being entrepreneurial, you know, going after the story. But look at how many stories are actually initiated by journalists. The great majority of stories are initiated by sources. Right? And, you know, when you when you factor in things like competition and things like, you know, people being on beats together, it's no, there's no, you know, surprise that that we get the pack journalism that we get. Right? I mean, it's kind of it's kind of baked into the enterprise. It takes a lot of courage to kind of separate from the pack, and it takes even more courage to sustain that separation from the pack, you know? But then you get codified as alternative, right? You get pushed to one side or the other. And one of the points I make in the book that, will probably not make many people happy is that I think that the left and the right have to come together on this like, I, you know, I track the story of what I see going on in what I call media left and what I see going on in what I call media right, and what I'm arguing is that at different points in time, they have traded places. So, whatever is going on in, in terms of the of the chipping away of liberal media today is going to go on in 20 years or 30 years in the chipping away of the conservative media. So, if we don't figure out that everybody is in this together and we have to build the system anew without making it all about polarization, right? I don't think we're going to get as far as we need to.
CORY BARKER: On that topic, obviously, in setting up the media left media right categories that you explore in detail in the book, you talk about some of the other binaries, you know, left, right, liberal, conservative, etc. How did you come to this particular distinction to use in the book? And can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, the roles of each of those entities in creating the kind of circumstances that we see in the Cold War and leading through to today?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Yeah. I mean, how did I come to it? I did not want this to be a book about, the small envelope of mainstream media. I did not want this book to be about legacy media, but it is a story about legacy media in and of itself. So, I was I was struggling with how to what do I call them? Like what… how do I differentiate? That was the moniker I finally came up with because I, I wanted to use a, a, a label that would make us think, right, that there are two entities, that there are two parts of the same entity insisting that they are two separate entities. And so, you know, there's no question, you know, that, you know, I mean, if you think about McCarthyism, I mean, you know, it's really only after media right actually say, “Hey, guys, this is a problem. We got to get rid of this man,” right? “We got to stop this,” that McCarthyism begins to be taken seriously, right? When you when you kind of go back and, you know, kind of pull out all of all of the stuff that makes it difficult to trace as a story that's really when things change for McCarthyism. And certainly, the right, media right, were much more in support or in the embrace of McCarthyism than the liberal media were. Right? Media left. But my argument is not so much that this comes out of media right, because there are other moments that things come out of media left and the same thing happens. Right? And so, I think it's important to recognize that there is one institution and it is called media. Right. And it's kind of like, you know, there is one institution and it is called politics, right? That doesn't mean that there aren't strains within it, but it means that we don't get very far as a country if those strains are always at war with each other. And I, you know, I, you know, I, I always take issue with the notion, you know, I mean, we all know we've been taught since we were in grade school, if we were lucky enough to go to a school that taught citizenship. You know, we would you know, we've always learned that journalism is necessary for democracy, right? But what we have assumed and what gets argued a lot is that democracy is central for journalism. And that's not true any journalism will exist. Journalism exists in autocratic countries all over the world. Right? And it's in the slide from the so-called democratic part of the spectrum to the so-called, autocratic, part of the spectrum that that happens because we are so interested, right, in what journalism is doing for democracy, what journalism is doing for capitalism. And we really have to we have to shake that up.
MATT JORDAN: It seems like a lot of those questions aren't being asked of what we would call mainstream media. So, let me ask, how do we understand the mainstream media? Right. Right now? I mean, what is it? Where did that concept come from? Does it even exist? Or is it this fantasy that radical centrist journalists who, you know, report their news from nowhere, try to occupy?
BARBIE ZELIZER: I mean, the fact that you can ask that question means that it doesn't have the kind of coherence that we need. Right? Where did it come from? I don't know if actually if it came as a term from the right or the left, but I think that the right has decried it. At the same time as the left has upheld it. Right? I mean, now mainstream media are seen as, you know, a very large problem. The way I deal with mainstream media is I always have media critics in one ear at the same time as I'm looking at what's going on in the media. Otherwise, you can't understand anything. But I think that the, the notion of mainstream media in some sense, echoes the, the need that we have for a center. Right? We need a center. We all there's this myth, right, that we need the center. The center needs to be. I mean, even when you look at the, the Paramount takeover, right? And they're talking about CNN today, as you know, you know, positioning itself center-right, center-left, which, of course it does. That's not where it started. Right? And so, you know, I think that these things shift, and they shift in ways that allow us to keep the center intact, right, to keep the, the, the left and the right at the margins. Right. Because that's one of the myths of democracy as well. Right? So, it's all about, you know, how institutions collude, not just within an institution, but across them in keeping a particular understanding of how power dynamics are supposed to work.
CORY BARKER: You mentioned this earlier, but you also talk a lot about it in the book. But I'm curious, you know, there's a sense that you describe that how Cold War logic emerges during complicated times or complicated events. Right? But does this logic really just exist kind of all the time, or what are the distinctions you're sort of drawing as far as how it might emerge in a more prominent sense during, you know, eras of political unrest or during certain administrations. Can you define that a little bit more for us?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Right. It strikes me that I didn't actually I didn't offer you the other two markers, which actually get to your question. You know, because alongside enmity, right? Is this notion of invisibility, right. And invisibility being the idea that, things don't have to be visible for us to treat them as real. Right. And so, this idea of invisibility is, of course, is about, real wars, a real, real events, mostly wars, being treated as invisible and invisible wars or events being treated as real. And of course, this is the crux… this is the kind of foundational tension in the Cold War, which is, you know, we had to make this war of ideas seem real, right? Even though there were no, there was no violence, there were no deaths. There was no structural devastation in the territory of the two protagonists, the US and the USSR. At the same time as the wars at the side, right, the proxy wars, that people weren't exactly seeing could be made to be invisible. Right. And so, if you take the Korean War, we knew nothing about the Korean War was labeled a forgotten war even before we got there. Right? And why do I bring this up? Because when you're talking about how this kind of manifest, I mean, I like the idea of it, kind of… it never goes away. You're right. It but where you see something like invisibility come about, of course, is in the global War on Terror, right. This is a new forever war. This is exactly the war that it is on journalists to be patient, right? To watch it be prosecuted year after year after year. Sometimes when you don't even know, you know the protagonists, sometimes when you don't really know where it's where it's taking place. But it is a divorcing of coverage from evidence. And so, once you establish the ability or the, the necessity of divorcing coverage from evidence like it, you don't have to, you know, it doesn't have to be real for us to treat it as real. That could go anywhere. Right? And so, I think that what happens with the Cold War logic— and the third piece is outreach, the idea again, that that, that we needed the media intact to be showing the world our way of, of life. Right. And so, this is about extraordinary collusion. It's about it's about excessive cronyism, right, to proximate source-journalist relations. And so, what we get there, in all of these is, you know, whatever is needed at a given point, you can see one of these markers kind of reassert itself, so it doesn't go away, but it is kind of under the surface. I think that in in times of calm, although it's harder, it's harder to remember those these days in times of calm, you know, I don't think that the Cold War logic necessarily makes itself known, but it is it is there for the taking when things begin to get a little bit complicated.
MATT JORDAN: I was struck by one of the things we talked about on the show a lot is news avoidance. That was kind of our frame for thinking about this. It was a problem we saw in young kids, you know, that they're not nobody's wants to watch the news. And I was struck that you were talking about how this Cold War press created a ton of anxiety, right? Because of the invisible wars, the looming death threat to having people practice duck and cover under the bed, all of that stuff. You describe how the press even kind of attached on to this and started to give permission for people to tune out. I was interested in what is it about that anxiety production that you think maybe it feeds a feedback loop that exacerbates some of the Cold War journalism problems?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Yeah. And what is it about that feedback loop that gets us right up to today? Because it's the same feedback loop. You're right. I mean, I think, look, the Cold War was built on fear, right? It was built on the expectation that the public would be fearful enough that the Cold War warriors were going to be able to reach their aims. Right? The media were essential for this. I maintain quite strongly that without the media, there would have been no Cold War. Right? There needed to be a mechanism to kind of massage people into anxiety. And, you know, I mean, when you look back and you see, I mean, one of my, one of the worst examples, but my favorite example at the same time, you know, is, is, you know, what happened in the Crusade for Freedom, right? When, when then President Truman was, trying to get people, to support the freedom radios, right? The freedom radios were VOA the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc., etc. and he wanted the public to be involved, and to feel indebted right to the media. The media that he was already using, right to spread, disseminate, you know, a Cold War mode of thinking not only in the United States but abroad. And, you know, I think it's like $7 million truth dollars, they call them, they raised to support the freedom radios. But the freedom radios were already funded. They were already funded by the CIA. So here you have this mechanism where the government is involved, the CIA is involved, advertising agencies is involved, the Ad Council is involved, and you've got the, the, what is it called? The Freedom for America campaign. Like, you've got all of these entities all in cahoots, right? Working the media to keep people on, on the edge of their seats. Right. And, you know, the media really followed suit. I mean, much of Cold War coverage was about imagining a nuclear war, right? Much, much of Cold War coverage was quite stunningly, it was really frightening. There was, you know, there were constant, repetitive attempts to imagine, to imagine into, drawings basically because they couldn't use photographs. What, what would be left after nuclear devastation, what would be left after World War three? Right. And so, there's no better way to keep people, manipulated, right, than to keep them fearful. And people were scared. There's no question about it. And they were manipulated. No question about that either.
CORY BARKER: I want to ask you two questions about the Cold War logic and sort of the reporting on the 2024 election and then sort of into the Trump administration. So you talk near the end of the book about, and I think you even say that the media news coverage of the 2024 election leading up to it and, you know, the sort of coverage and thinking about, could Trump get reelected, right, or get elected for a second time, that they just got it wrong, right? To go back to this idea that media… they get a lot of things wrong. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you came to that conclusion? Not that I think we disagree with that conclusion, but just what is your thought on the way in which the contemporary media is and has covered, you know, that campaign and now this administration? And then I've got a related follow up for you.
BARBIE ZELIZER: Well, I mean, they repeated the mistakes of the past. That's the easiest way to start this. I mean, they're, they're look, there's no question that there have been faults on all sides here, right? I mean, it's not just the media, it's the politicians. It's politicians on both sides. I mean, there's been a lot of disappointment and a lot of disillusionment. Right? But I think that what we saw with journalism is this kind of repair to what I would call values and practices that were entrenched during the Cold War to minimize the threat that was Trump. Right? And so, you know, and one of the biggest things in the first Trump camp— in the first Trump administration was, of course, is he lying or is he just, you know, telling mistruths? You know, so I mean, the euphemisms that were used, the sanewashing that was used, the gaslighting, I mean, all of the things that are familiar to us from the Cold War period we saw in 2024 and before. And, you know, I mean, I think that the, you know, it's not only the erroneous reading of the fact that Trump was going to get elected again. Right? I mean, you know, there's so many things that you can pull in there. But I think that the thing that was more disappointing to me is that after the fact, they didn't switch it up. Like, that's what you do with a dictator. That's what you do with an autocrat. You believe him, you know, you take him out at his at his, at his word, you know, and there was constant, constant, and there's still is minimization of what's going on. I mean, look at the war on Iran, right? Have we heard any legitimation, any justification as to why we're about to attack Iran if we actually do? No. We're just talking about when. Right? So, we, you know, this is on journalism. Where it's journalism here? And, you know, I mean, there are media critics who are certainly saying and they have been saying since 2024 that it was it was a mismatch between what good reporters were trying to produce. Right. And what bad editors were trying to suppress. And that might be the case. It might be the case. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't care who it is. Right? The point is, is that as a public, we are getting hogwash. Like we are not getting the kind of coverage that we need to be able to figure out whether or not we want to live in an autocratic country. The fact that, even the question of calling him autocratic, right? That took so long, I mean, he was saying it straight out, everything he said he has done. Right? And so, you know, it's very much I mean, this is very much a pull back to McCarthy as well. You know, this, he's not smart enough. He is not you know, he doesn't really know what he's saying. His advisers are running him. That all may be true, but it's still happening.
CORY BARKER: Yeah. You predicted what I was going to ask because I was going to ask then, you know, what is your assessment of the coverage since he, you know, came back into office and specifically, I was also thinking about, the potential, you know, attack or efforts in Iran. And I think what's interesting about that, to me, in the frame of what we've been talking about today and in your book, is that it doesn't even feel as if the sort of news infrastructure apparatus is sort of playing their role in the same way that they have historically, like during, you know, the lead up to the War on Terror, where there's not even an effort to kind of launder some sort of reason for why we're doing this, like freedom or we need to democratize or anything like that. It's just the coverage is sort of like, well, yeah, it's going to happen. And then that kind of moving on and not even necessarily it to a degree to meet the moment of at least pushing them is like, why are we doing this? Right? And I think that's even in an interesting point in that, you know, the media is fulfilling its role, but also not even doing the kind of artifice of it, not even playing that role where they describe, you know, we're doing this for the good of the nation or for peace in the Middle East or anything like that. It's just like, no, it's happening. Right? And there's the facade is sort of away in that regard.
BARBIE ZELIZER: Right. I mean, there are little phrases that get cluttered that are cold from the Cold War. You know, we're defending, you know, you know, freedom writ large whether they think it's freedom or not. Right? But I think it's interesting because, you know, much has been made of the fact that, you know, the fact that we don't have, per se, an autocratic memory, a memory of an autocratic government in the way that other countries do. You know, I mean, I, I run this center at the, at Penn, the center for Media at Risk, which I started at the moment, that right when Trump came into power, the first time. And what was so telling for me why I did this is I was in it. I was in Finland at the time at the, the Collegium for Advanced Study. And I remember the day after the elections, I was, you know, meeting with all the, my cohort group, you know, these were scholars from Russia and Latvia and Lithuania and Poland and Czech Republic and Hungary. And they basically said to me, what did you expect? And I remember thinking, oh, that's the question, right? Like, why is it that we don't why we have not been able to imagine ourselves into this role, despite the fact that we seem to imagine ourselves into this role every place else, right? Like every place else in the world, we do not treat ourselves with the same, with the same expectations. I mean, this is where the exceptionalism really lies, right? It's that we exceptionalism ourselves from the stuff that differentiates us from that that difference differentiates them from us. In other words, it's the enmity, again. It's everything that we've given that side. We are not going to… we're not we're not there. Right? We're the good ones. And so, you know, the fact that, you know, we have not been able the American institutions have not been able to get in front of this story. Right? And the media have not been able to get in front of this story. Is a is a fatal lack of imagination. Right? And it's embarrassing, you know, it's embarrassing and it's and it's and it's, it's going to kill us in the end. I mean, you know, it's going to kill democracy, as we know it, and it's going to kill the capacity to come back. And, you know, that's linked also with the question of solidarity. Right? You know, we don't have the kind of solidarity in this country in any institutional setting that we that we could and that we should.
MATT JORDAN: Do you do you think, I mean, this obviously would seem to me to be one of these social practices of journalism. That is a problem. The part of the pack, everybody kind of reinforcing tendencies. And you because one of the things that you see in the Cold War and also in our times, is an incredible amount of flak against journalists, from the government and also from corporate sponsors that are that are disciplining them to be normalized in that way. Is that what kind of does this or is it more just that they, that, that flack, that kind of working, the ref constantly saying you're being biased, you're not being objective. What is it that keeps journalists. Because what you're describing kind of seems like journalists are, you know, like in The Emperor's New Clothes, right? They don't want to be the one who says the emperor is naked, right? Somebody else will do that. It's that journalists don't do that. That's not our call. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you've actually answered the question, like, I think that, you know, like, look, this is what Timothy Snyder, the, historian, American historian, calls it anticipatory obedience. Right? Like, I mean, I think it's I don't think that we have I mean, I think it's both I think it's both pressures from outside. Absolutely. And it's pressures from inside. And it's, you know, you know, kind of, implicit modes of social control. People don't want to lose their jobs. People don't want to be, you know, you know, laughed at in the middle of a press conference and told that they're fat, right? Like, you know, like all it's everything. It's everything. And I think that what we're missing is we're missing the ability inside of journalism to figure out how to stand on their feet, you know, and that, you know it again. I mean, I know I said this already, but if we do not if we do not task journalism and journalists with making themselves better, nothing's going to change, you know, because the political and the commercial pressures are just… they're just intensifying, right? And they're intensifying at a point in time where less and less people are paying attention to the fact that our democracy has dwindled. Right. We are already in autocratic incline. Right? So, you know, you got to switch modes, right? You got to switch classes; you got to get out of this school and get into another school. Right? When you realize that the context isn't responding to what it is you want, then you got it. You got to look at yourself and say, what are we doing wrong? Right? And the problem, of course, is, you know, what I call occupational fixity. I mean, journalists don't like change. They just don't. Right. And, you know, what has worked in the past, if it works today, it will continue to work tomorrow. Right? And if it doesn't work as well as we want it to, we can do little patch jobs, right? We don't have to paint the whole room. Right? I'm saying tear down the house. Right? You know, when I did the, my book, when I coauthored the book, The Journalism Manifesto with Pablo Boczkowski and Chris Anderson, we got to the end of the book, and, of course, this is a book where we kind of take apart, you know, values and norms, and we say that all this has to be reassigned. It has to be rethought, has to be, you know, kind of recaptured from the bottom up. And we got to the end of the book and, you know, you know, we're saying, so how are we going to conclude this? Like, and we did this book during Covid, so it was it was a fabulous Covid project because we were just all the time in three different time zones, you know, on zoom, figuring out the arguments of this book and, we get to the end of the book and, and, you know, and Pablo and, and Chris kind of said, well, you know, we're going to reset, you know, we're going to reset. And I said, no, we're going to revolutionize. We got to like start from the so we couldn't agree. And our, our last chapter is both about resetting and about revolutionizing. But I really think the revolution is called for. I mean, as a country, we're not we're not exactly a country that privileges our revolutionary past. I mean, you know, students don't learn about the American Revolution the way the French do, for instance. You know, but, I mean, I think that this calls for an absolutely, fundamental rethink of what journalism needs to be, you know, and it's not only what journalism needs to be. We need to reimagine what America needs to be. We need to reimagine the United States that can deal with the decline of its own democratic regime. Right. And what comes next? It doesn't have to be autocracy. Right. And but that that depends on, on the players.
MATT JORDAN: One of the things that strikes me about the difference between the first Red scare, you know, post-World War One, the Cold War ‘50s, and now is that in both of the first two, you had this incredible, fear of foreign influence, right? That, that the big scare was, you know, you know, the people bringing in reports from Bolshevik Russia, and the Soviets working the, you know, Hollywood and etc. that's why we had that blacklist. What seems to be lacking is that fear of the external influence. Now, the right, and it surprises me that people who like my dad, who grew up in the Cold War on media right, have none of that same antipathy, A, toward Russia that they once it was once ingrained, and, B, just don't seem to be bothered by the fact that our media system today is completely overwhelmed by foreign propaganda and disinformation. Why do you think that is?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Wow. I think I would be very rich if I could figure out that question. It's such a fabulous question. My gut response would be to say that this is what globalization is about, right? Like we have, you know, and you look, I'm not a cheerleader for the nation state by any means. But, you know, we've we I think at some level, Trump has tried to position himself ahead, right, in thinking, well, you know, different national players aren't going to really be that important anymore, so long as we, the one national player remain at the top right. And so, it's behind all of the yeah, I think that that's behind all of the, you know, the kind of the chipping away of all of these Cold War, you know, the, you know, NATO and the alliances that might have made sense, right. They're just kind of they're all over the place. I also think maybe it's an answer to people, as you say, who don't know the first thing about first world versus second world versus third world. Right. About global North versus global South, you know, and don't care.
CORY BARKER: So, you're talking about we need a sort of revolution of journalism beyond like revolution in the country. Right? I'm curious from your perspective, like where are the places for that to start? Right? Do you think we need an overhauling of journalism education in a way that sort of teaching younger journalists, different ways of doing this? Is it, you know, that we also need more people to step outside of the institutions of, you know, working for these kind of legacy corporate media, whether that's, you know, going sort of solo on the internet in, in various forms. Right? Is it a combination of those things? I'm sure it's, it's 50 things, but what sort of things come to the forefront of your mind when you're thinking about how this potential revolution of, of a trade, right, actually can happen moving forward?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Right. I mean, you know, that starts with the basic fact that nobody trusts the media anymore, right? Like, so, you know, this we have we have an uphill climb, right? If we're going to re reinstate journalism with any value. I think it is journalism education. I think it is, you know, moving in as is already happening, moving into the kinds of alternative setups, the alternative outlets that offer different ways to display and to build journalistic authority, for sure. But I also think it's about media literacy. I think, you know, I mean, you know, when I said before that, you know, if you were lucky enough to have a civics class in your high school, you know, were you lucky enough to have a media literacy program, right? Like, you know, I wasn't. Right? I grew up in the Midwest. There was no such thing. Right? You know, if we don't begin to teach people how to engage with the media, right, the media are losing another right kind of source of their own of their own, of the necessity of their own existence and, and of how to legitimate the things that they do. So, it's like, you know, that that connection between journalism and the public has to come back. It has to come back. I, I care less about the institutional culture than I care about that. You know, when students come into my class and I'm teaching right now a class on critical perspectives on journalism to undergraduates, and when they come to my class, they, you know, they don't always have… first of all, they don't necessarily want to be journalists, which is fine. I'm not there to teach them to be journalists. I'm there to teach them to be critical media consumers or critical media publics or critical media, audiences, whatever, whatever moniker we want to put there. But they don't even they don't even want that necessarily. And so, you know, there's a there's a real challenge to getting them to understand how the media, how to read a media article, how to understand a headline, what is important about where and how journalistic engagement takes shape. Right? And to and to and to be cognizant of that and also to be cognizant of moving beyond boundaries. Right? I think a lot of this is about it's about it's about boundaries. You know that we think that the American, the American news media are the beginning and end of the record of the world. Not so. And so, if we can just kind of step outside a little bit and look back in, both in terms of democracy and autocracy, in terms of the United States and other countries, in terms of the legacy media outlets and all of the new startups. I think that that's maybe a note for moving forward. In a different, slightly different way.
MATT JORDAN: Well, Barbie, thank you so much for being with us. And thank you for your book. And, we'll keep up the fight, if you will.
BARBIE ZELIZER: Will do. Thank you for having me.
CORY BARKER: Thank you so much. Matt, I think that was a great conversation with Barbie Zelizer, one that provides a lot of wonderful historical context and parallels to so many things that we talk about on this show. What are some of your big takeaways from our chat with her?
MATT JORDAN: Well, part of it is what she was talking about, just in terms of the anxiety produced by this kind of Cold War logic. You know, this… I woke up today and was reading about how we're about to bomb Iran, right. And immediately filled with a kind of a dread that this was something that was out of my hands. And it does strike me that, you know, if you've seen the old duck and cover things that they used to show for kids in school, that people lived with that anxiety. And what this does, I think, is it makes you more acquiescent. It makes you more willing to just accept what you're told to do. So, this kind of conformity that comes out of that, I can feel that chill in our in our times today. How about you?
CORY BARKER: You know, as we talk to her, you could sense in her voice and her answers that, as a former journalist, she is really so frustrated and pained by the situation we find ourselves in. And I had a much less successful journalism career than she did. But as someone who has a journalism degree and has worked in news and journalism in various forms, I find myself of course, feeling that way. We express that a lot on this show where you know, these things are happening in the world and certain things are occurring within our government, you know, in other governments. And you often just feel like the news on a mainstream sort of level, if we're going to use that label, it's just not up to the task right now. And it's difficult to know what to do with that. Right? Where you want to support news as an industry. You want to support journalists, you kind of want to, you know, make that a key part of what you do as an engaged citizen in a contemporary society. And when you see certain news organizations or that sort of the whole apparatus not be up to the task, it can be really dispiriting. Right? And I think for us, as we continue to have these kind of conversations, it's important to focus on the potential routes of improvement, whether that is kind of reformation or revolution, to use some of her framing there, you know, and the different ways that we can support journalists who are doing it in the way that we think works better for society and better for informing people and potentially better, you know, for democracy, because it is really easy to, I think, see the frustrating things happening out there. So, I'm always trying to remind myself that there are ways to kind of focus on the positive. And are people doing good work out there? That's it for this episode of News Over Noise, our guest was Barbie Zelizer, professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of How the Cold War Broke the News. To learn more, visit news-over-noise-dot-org. I'm Matt Jordan.
CORY BARKER: And I'm Cory Barker.
MATT JORDAN: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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