The British Press and the Greek Crisis, 1943–1949

Orchestrating the Cold-War 'Consensus' in Britain

Gioula Koutsopanagou

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781137551559
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: British History

This book provides the first detailed analysis of how interactions between government policy and Fleet Street affected the political coverage of the Greek civil war, one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. During this period the exponential growth of media influence was an immensely potent weapon of psychological warfare. Throughout the 1940s the press maintained its position as the most powerful medium and its influence remained unchallenged. The documentary record shows that a British media consensus was more fabricated than spontaneous, and the tools of media persuasion and manipulation were extremely important in building acceptance for British foreign policy. Gioula Koutsopanagou examines how this media consensus was influenced and molded by the British government and how Foreign Office channels were key to molding public attitudes to British foreign policy. These channels included system of briefings given by the News Department to the diplomatic correspondents, and the contacts between embassies and the British foreign correspondents.

© The Author(s) 2020

G. KoutsopanagouThe British Press and the Greek Crisis, 1943–1949Palgrave Studies in the History of the Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55155-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. In the Realm of the ‘Cultural Cold War’: The Media in the History of the Cold War

Gioula Koutsopanagou¹

(1)

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece

Gioula Koutsopanagou

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Historians have not yet fully assessed the growing role that, in the twentieth century, media influence played with regard to the planning and implementation of a country’s domestic and foreign policy. In the Cold War period the exponential growth of media influence was an immensely potent and direct instrument of psychological warfare . This is what this book aims to reveal. It is a study of the attitudes expressed in the British press towards Greece between 1943 and 1949, and the extent to which those attitudes were influenced by British government policy. The nature of the Greek political crisis and the country’s strategic location make this a significant early episode in what was a rapidly changing political situation, as the Cold War gradually tightened its grip.

The approach to writing the history of the Cold War that prevailed until 1970s was dominated by the notion of a fierce confrontation between the two postwar superpowers , the United States and the USSR . Two pioneering articles highlighted Britain’s role in the emergence and the course of the Cold War. Donald Cameron Watt’s article in 1978¹ ‘initiated systematic research on the role of Britain as a key player during this period’.² Two years later, Lyn Smith’s article, published in the London School of Economics journal Millennium, ³ set out the organization and methods of British Cold War propaganda.⁴ Since then, historians have documented how, as early as 1945, Britain became the first country to formulate a coordinated response to communist propaganda .⁵

In the period covered by this study, the role of propaganda, which started as a supplement to Britain’s foreign policy, became an integral part of her Cold War strategy. Yet, the part played by the British press at the onset of the Cold War has been the subject of relatively little scrutiny and its role has not yet been fully investigated.⁶ Scholars have paid limited attention to the role of propaganda in building a concerted response to the Soviets in the early Cold War period.⁷ Immediately after Germany was safely defeated there was a commonly held notion that public opinion formers, especially newspaper editors, switched to outright hostility towards the Soviet Union as the fear of Nazism was swiftly succeeded by the fear of Communism. Historical evidence, however, has so far indicated that the hardening of Fleet Street attitudes towards the Soviet Union was not simply a response to Soviet aggression, as had been previously thought. In fact, as Tony Shaw has argued, the consensus against Soviet policy in the British media, although not completely uniform, ‘was less spontaneous and more manufactured’ than has hitherto appeared.⁸ John Jenks concluded that ‘much of the consensus came about through a gradual, negotiated revision of the media’s common sense of the world situation’. The propaganda of the Information Research Department (IRD) ‘helped provide the detailed knowledge necessary to maintain this consensus’.⁹ Martin Moore has called the Labour government a pioneer in what ‘has now come to be known as modern “spin”’. He argued that the period 1945–1951 was crucial ‘in the development of communication between the government, the media and the people in Britain’, and explored how the Labour government passed ‘from idealism to pragmatism, from a vision of an informed electorate to a worldly acceptance of the manipulation of communication to engineer consent’.¹⁰ Andrew Defty identified the debate as to whether public attitude towards the Soviet Union was manipulated by Western government efforts within a neo-revisionist perspective.¹¹ This ‘wide-scale campaign to manufacture an anti-communist consensus at home and abroad on a scale comparable with Soviet subversion’, he stated, ‘has naturally led to suggestions of moral equivalence’. Yet, new evidence from Soviet archives suggested that the scale of communist subversion abroad ‘was such that Western leaders, and indeed propaganda, may even have underestimated the Soviet threat’ . Defty found ‘no evidence of a coordinated campaign primarily directed at the manufacture of public opinion in Britain’. There was no official wish to conduct some kind of British McCarthyism and undermine the Left in Britain. The IRD’s strenuous efforts were, rather, to convince Britain’s main anti-communist ally that ‘the British Left was not susceptible to communist influence’.¹² However, whatever the historical approach, it remains the case that both countries, Britain and the United States , sought to strengthen their ties with the communist sympathizers and, above all, to win over the neutral or the non-aligned. In creating an anti-communist consensus outside and within their own countries, all means were recruited to extend Cold War values to every level of society. Cultural Cold War scholars have explored the breadth of this anti-communist campaign in areas—intellectual, cultural, and artistic—not previously examined.¹³ In a ‘war of words’, ideas and culture, rather than power, were equally instrumental.¹⁴

The documentary record shows that a British media consensus was more fabricated than spontaneous. This was the conclusion drawn by my doctoral thesis (1996),¹⁵ and its underlying argument is documented in further detail in the present monograph as a result of extensive additional primary research conducted in numerous British and Greek public and private archives , personal papers, memoirs, and unpublished personal accounts. It provides the first detailed analysis of how interactions between government policy and Fleet Street affected the political coverage of the Greek civil war, one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War. That the first major crisis of the Greek situation in December 1944 occurred during the high tide of leftist/resistance enthusiasm and in the continuing Anglo-Soviet wartime honeymoon means that British tools of media persuasion and manipulation were extremely important in building acceptance for British policy.

In occupied Europe, new social dynamics were emerging that posed a challenge to the status quo ante. The war had radicalized a large part of public opinion in Britain, and even traditional Conservative opinion shifted leftwards, as can been seen in the defection of The Times and The Observer . Central issue in this debate concerned Britain’s approach towards the Soviet Union—a gallant wartime ally that, gradually, became a bitter enemy. It chiefly aims to observe how the British press covered the civil war in Greece, one of the first episodes in the early and gradually escalating Cold War. Britain was deeply involved in the Greek crisis. While the war was not yet over and the Allied forces were still relying on the resistance movements across Europe for the final defeat of fascism, the bloody events of December 1944 in the centre of Athens brought British troops face to face with the forces of resistance and exposed British aims to the eyes of international public opinion . British public opinion was quite unprepared for this ‘breathtaking transition to a Cold War strategy, and the use of British troops against former leaders of the resistance’.¹⁶ The Greek political cri sis came as a first test of the British government’s reflexes with regard to the new realities in liberated Europe and press handling in the early postwar years. The Greek case serves as an example of how governmental manipulation constructed a commonsense narrative within the media’s representation of the issues in Britain during the early, formative years of the Cold War. The conduct of British policy in Greece after July 1945, as pursued by the Labour government , represented a real challenge to the ideological principles and morals of Labour and liberal public opinion . Public attitudes in this period began, in Europe and Greece alike, with high hopes and expectations for world peace , democracy, and social justice, and ended with the world divided into two hostile ideological and political camps, and with Greece devastated by a four-year civil war. The hardening of Cold War attitudes further complicated Greece’s already acute internal political conflicts. This study will trace British press reactions in the context of polarizing Cold War strategies, in order to discern whether developments in Greece were considered in relation to the Cold War climate, and whether attitudes towards Greece expressed. Misconceptions, misinterpretations, deceptions, and illusions will be also considered—in particular, whether and to what degree they were related to wider Cold War propaganda.

The relationship between government and the press , freedom of information, and governmental pressure on the press, either direct ...