How Truman's Media Kept America Blind

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How Truman’s Media Kept America Blind

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After the most important and famous war in American history, the two leading powers eased their way through the gradual process of atomic conflict with a semi-censored culture. The United States and the Soviet Union were a threat to the rest of the world because of the atomic weapons they currently held immediately after World War II. This groundbreaking news effected citizens and hurt their ways of family and consumer life. Although, choosing communism as their main political system, the Soviet Union was a danger to everyone. Therefore, the U.S. was pressured to create extremely hazardous weapons to protect the country’s well being. Society’s main concern from 1947 until the mid 1950s was having the knowledge that the U.S. and Soviets had types of weapons that can obliterate them. On top of the political and economic battles the Cold War faced, America became blind of different gender roles, consumer culture, and entertainment essentially coming from the government regulated media, or from information that should have been undeniably censored. The government chose to use different tactics to prevent chaos within the country’s mass media. Information and news that America connected with was mostly influenced by propaganda, forming a censored psychological war. The highest influential impression on society would be advertisements and media that are sold to the public and the impact it’s meaning has on them. At the time of the Cold War, the media shaped all aspects of consumer and political beliefs. During the Truman administration, he used “peacetime propaganda” after the Second World War “to gain legislative favor” (Parry-Giles 7) . This was later realized that it only favored Truman, but not his fellow Americans. The OWI (Office of War Information) hired specific journalists to write private news about the stages of the Cold War (Parry-Giles 6). They did this to shield the knowledge from citizens who will inevitably worry and criticize all aspects of government affairs. Americans started to believe nothing was seriously going on from the lack of written evidence they had, creating the psychological war effect. The arguments that went on from 1945 to 1948 about peacetime propaganda “reveal just how the Truman administration utilized a journalistic paradigm to assuage media and congressional reservations over the need for a peacetime propaganda program” (Parry-Giles 6). These disagreements stemmed from active politicians, who voiced that Truman did everything but implement a peacetime propaganda. Furthermore, legislative officials overruled Truman and claimed, “the U.S. news media [should] distribute newspapers and magazines abroad so as to educate the world about the country’s ideal and initiatives” (Parry-Giles 10). It is important for people to be notified about any controversy in their own country, but when it spreads to other countries, it can be too risky. Although, America’s view on Truman’s “friendly” propaganda changes, because later on, Parry-Giles continues saying that the Truman administration influences most of the coverage of America’s domestic press for compensation reasons (10). Essentially, Truman paid for magazines, such as The New York Herald Tribune, to cover stories unrelated to his covert affairs to protect himself. Besides supporting the idea that uncensored media was the outcome of the time period, Whitfield argues that the culture of the 1950s is not synthesized by the Cold War in his novel, The Culture of the Cold War (14). The author mentions that different forms of art and literature was not nearly touched by the acts of the war and that it was mostly due to the spread of communism (Whitfield 14). Since many were being accused of espionage with atomic information, no one wanted to become a target for the government. Instead, culturists kept their true expressions secret, and communicated with others differently. Ultimately
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