The media plays a very important role in international relations. Most citizens get their news from media outlets, which gives considerable weight to the media as a factor influencing public opinion. As editorials covered the Cold War fluctuation between conciliation and crisis, public opinion towards the Soviet Union fluctuated towards growing trust to growing mistrust. Policy decisions depended on public opinion- without support from the public diplomats lost credibility in negotiations.
This report explores the relationship between events, educated public opinion and actual political decisions by analyzing editorials and international news items.
“A separate statistical analysis of data from the deepest crisis periods and from conciliation phases revealed the following: Simplification of issues was significantly associated with distrust of the Soviets in the crisis data and with trust of them in the conciliation phases.” (p ii)
This report was released to the Nautilus Institute under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).