The Media during the Cold War | 163people’s perspectives remained focused on their own nations. Nevertheless the
EBU was remarkably successful. As early as 1954 it distinguished itself with its
‘Eurovision’ that aired sports events like the Football World Cup, and images
of the Vatican and of national cultures. Joint programmes like the European
Song Contest tended to be exceptions, but the ‘European News Exchange’ pro-
vided a regular transfer of film material and thus allowed Western Europe to be
united in its viewing, while the spoken commentary was left to the respective
countries. In this system, sports accounted for approximately 50 per cent of
the shared programmes, news material 35 per cent and cultural offerings 15
per cent (Eugster 1983: 152; Fickers 2009: 391, 408). Dictatorships like Spain
and Portugal tried to find recognition via European television events. It would
be well to study in more detail the exact manner in which the exchange and
sharing of programmes as well as the reworking of sound tracks proceeded in
order to gain new insights into the cultural coalescence of Europe. Moreover,
EBU and OIRT were models for further consolidations such as the ‘Asia-Pa-
cific Union’ (1964), ‘Arab States Broadcasting’ (1969) and the ‘Organización
de la Televisión Iberoamericana’ (1970).
Television can also be studied as a global arena in which transnational
battles for worldviews, influence and prestige were fought during the Cold
War. This is true not only of the aforementioned German–German television.
The first intercontinental live broadcast, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
in 1953, was an attempt by Great Britain to use television as a means of posi-
tioning itself globally. Parts of Western Europe saw the coronation live, and
copies were flown immediately to the United States and Japan so as many as
18 million American households were able to watch it (Schwoch 2009: 90f.).
In 1961 the Soviet Union landed a coup with the live transmission in Europe
of the first manned space flight, to which the United States responded in 1962
with its first live broadcast to Western Europe of an American astronaut on the
first earth orbit (ibid.: 126). America’s moon landing in 1969 was deliberately
coupled with its airing on global television. In this respect the goal of demon-
strating modernity to the entire world via television was closely connected to
space travel.
Since 1965 the United States has been able to achieve a position of global
media dominance through its news satellites. This was buttressed in the 1960s
by the vision of a common global television system that would make everyone
‘world citizens’, sharing a common awareness of the world (Ruchatz 2003:
141; Schwoch 2009: 143). However, during the Cold War the limitations of
this plan soon became clear: the Soviets refused to participate in the Intelsat
organisation, instead founding their own Intersputnik group as its counterpart
to integrate the Socialistic states. Even in West Germany and France, a ‘world
television’ and live broadcasts from the United States met with reservations for
fear of American dominance. There is no doubt that the Americans wanted