ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what television news reports about the USSR: television’s image of ‘the enemy’. It focuses on coverage recorded on the deaths of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko between November 1982 and March 1985. These ‘special’ events saw the Soviet government pass through a period of rapid change. The selection of news about the Soviet Union is partly determined, like other categories of output, by routine journalistic news values. The Soviet Union is frequently mentioned in news coverage of international trouble spots, such as the Middle East or Central America. The US government, in line with the general tendency of the Reagan administration to make sense of international crises in terms of ‘Soviet expansionism’, held that the problem was related to Soviet influence in the region. Television news accounts of Soviet military power tend to reflect those views which maximize the Soviet threat and assume ‘worst-case’ assessments of Soviet capabilities to be true.
