media and material

I have been grappling with a loose and uninformed thought recently, which is that basically every major power in the world during the Cold War over-valued the power of media. In the West this manifested as a full-on media blitz, a concocted celebration of United States imperialism, the engines of our creative factories blasting out more and more movies, music, advertising, whatever possible to try and counter the global Left. Simultaneously, domestic suppression campaigns (e.g. McCarthyism) were accelerated to contain the internal Left's media output. In the broader Communist world you saw a corresponding arms race in censorship and centralized control over creative output. The Soviets were of course terrified of Western cultural influence and that manifested in greater scrutiny of artistic output almost across the board. The Cultural Revolution in China in the late years of Mao's life could be considered an overcorrection against a perceived cultural rightward shift (itself a shift…