About the 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).
Episode Transcript:
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 Cold War–era assumptions about enmity, objectivity, access, and authority, and shows how those assumptions still shape news routines today, often in ways journalists don’t fully recognize. Dr. Zelizer is a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most influential scholars in journalism studies. Her work explores how journalism constructs meaning, memory, and authority, and how those constructions can both inform the public and quietly 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 resonates well 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 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. When 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 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 allow Cold War warriors. the Cold War thinkers to use the media to their own aims.
CORY BARKER: If we step back for one second, you know, 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 terminology reflect how your thoughts about this situation, in 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 the topic of my next book. It was right around the time that Putin came into public, the public eye, at least, the inter— 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 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 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 on and what 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 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 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, and all the things that that go along with Trump, how does that start to happen in the McCarthy era, that the autocratic leadership starts to get normalized in the press?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Right. Also, 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, we're moral, they're amoral. If we're democratic, they're communist. 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. 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 kind of come around. And it's enmity both within and beyond, right? It's enmity beyond which, 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 could get caught 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 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, 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 being targeted, they pushed back on McCarthy by simply treating him as a joke. Not at all the kind of efficient, defense that one wants 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 had things like editor and publisher, you know, saying that, you know, this was a way over-reported story at the time. And so, journalists did not rise to the occasion. They did everything that we see being done now in the face of autocracy point to right, which is saying Washington, 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. 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, 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 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 they weren't listening then. Right? And even though there were, there were people like, 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 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, how do you feel like news organizations and journalists have dealt with their own failures since the Cold War?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Not well.
CORY BARKER: Yeah.
BARBIE ZELIZER: 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, nobody else is going to clean 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 journalists, there were many media criticism outlets, you know, that after the fact 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 if it's a swear word. Right? I mean, this is really one of the main points is that we have so diminished 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, but not by and large and certainly not by and large in the way that it would push practitioners to kind of think again, pushed editors and publishers, 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 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: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Matt Jordan.
CORY BARKER: And I’m Cory Barker.
MATT JORDAN: We’re talking with media scholar Barbie Zelizer about her new book, How the Cold War Broke the News, and how Cold War–era thinking continues to shape journalism today. One of the phrases that you use to think about the dynamic you're talking about is pack journalism. So how would a journalist get pulled into the pack? 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 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 surprise that we get the journalism that we get. Right? I mean, it's kind of baked into the enterprise. It takes a lot of courage to separate from the pack, and it takes even more courage to sustain that separation from the pack, you know? But then you get commodified 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 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 terms of the chipping away of a 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, 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 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 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 label that would make us think, right, that there are two parts of the same entity insisting that they are two separate entities. And so, there's no question, you know, that if you think about McCarthyism, I mean, it's really only after media, right, that 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 kind of go back and pull out all of this stuff that makes it difficult to trace as a story, that's really when things change from McCarthyism. And certainly, the right, media right, were much more in support or in the embrace of McCarthyism than the liberal media were, 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. 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 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, we've always learned that journalism is necessary for democracy. But what we have assumed, and what gets argued a lot, is that democracy is central for journalism. And that's not true. 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 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: How do we understand the mainstream media 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 that 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 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 notion of mainstream media in some sense echoes the need that we have for a center. Right? We need a center. We all know there's this myth that we need the center. The center needs to be, I mean, even when you look at the Paramount takeover, and they're talking about CNN today, as 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, to keep the left and the right at the margins, because that's one of the myths of democracy as well. So, it's all about, you know, how institutions collude not just within an institution, but across them and 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 you described how Cold War logic emerges during complicated times or complicated events. But does this logic really just exist 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 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 offer you the other two markers, which actually get to your question, because alongside enmity is this notion of invisibility 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 events, mostly wars, being treated as invisible and invisible, wars or events being treated as real. And of course, 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, even though 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, 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 manifests, I mean, it never goes away. You're right. But where you see something like invisibility come about, of course, is in the global War on Terror, right? This is this is a new forever war. This is exactly the war that it is on journalists to be patient, to watch it be prosecuted year after year after year, sometimes when you don't even know the protagonists, sometimes when you don't really know where it's taking place. It is a divorcing of coverage from evidence. 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 the third piece is outreach. The idea, again, that we needed the media intact to be showing the world our way of life. And so, this is about extraordinary collusion. It's about excessive cronyism 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 reassert itself, so it doesn't go away. But it is kind of under the surface. I think that in times of calm, I don't think that Cold War logic necessarily makes itself known, but it is there for the taking when things begin to get a little bit complicated.
MATT JORDAN: 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. What is it about that anxiety production that feeds a feedback loop that exacerbates some of the Cold War journalism problems?
BARBIE ZELIZER: 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 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. There needed to be a mechanism to kind of massage people into anxiety. And, you know, the media really followed suit. I mean, much of Cold War coverage was about imagining a nuclear war. And so, there's no better way to keep people manipulated than to keep them fearful. And people were scared, there's no question about that. And they were manipulated, no question about that either.
CORY BARKER: You talked at the end of the book about the media news coverage of the 2024 election, that they just got it wrong. What is your thought on the way in which the contemporary media is and has covered that campaign and now this administration?
BARBIE ZELIZER: Well, they repeated the mistakes of the past. 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. 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, you know, I mean, there are media critics who are certainly saying and have been saying since 2024, it was a mismatch between what good reporters were trying to produce and what bad editors were trying to suppress. And that 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. I think it's interesting because we don't have a memory of an autocratic government in the way that other countries do, you know? I mean, I remember the day after the elections when Trump came into power, the first time I was in Finland at the time, meeting with 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… like, we have not been able to imagine ourselves into this role. I mean, this is where the exceptionalism really lies, right? It's that we exceptionalism ourselves from the stuff that differentiates them from us. In other words, we're the good ones. And so, the fact that we've not been able to get in front of this story is a fatal lack of imagination. And it's embarrassing and 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. 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. You know, but, I mean, I think that this calls for an absolutely fundamental rethink of what journalism needs to be. And it's not only what journalism needs to be, we need to reimagine what America needs to be. We need to reimagine a United States that can deal with the decline of its own democratic regime. And what comes next. It doesn't have to be autocracy, but that that depends on the players.
MATT JORDAN: Well, Barbie Zelizer, 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: Willdo. Thank you for having me.
CORY BARKER: Thank you so much.
MATT JORDAN: 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.org. I’m Matt Jordan.
CORYBARKER: 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.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. 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.
