Guest editor's introduction: International news after the Cold War: Continuity or change?

Naturalising the new cold war: The geopolitics of framing the Ukrainian conflict in four European newspapers

“…Before the dissolution of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, for decades, the notion of the cold war had provided a powerful narrative of international relations with which to explain complex military and political events in international news and mainstream political discourse (Hanson, 1995; Norris, 1995). Prescribing an ideological and military rivalry between East and West, it not only aided in the orientation of Western foreign policy by placing the Soviet Union as the primary threat to national and international security (Meyer, 1995), but also helped legitimise and naturalise those policies in the public sphere (Herman and Chomsky, 2008 [1988]).…”

US news media’s framing of the ‘North Korean crisis’ under the Trump administration: The new ideological foreign affairs paradigm

“…Exemplifying how such processes function ideologically to legitimate particular formulations of power, wherein particular macro frames are naturalized into dominant commonsense understandings through their uncritical acceptance by journalists is scholarship concerned with the ascension, significance, and erosion of a 'Cold War' foreign affairs frame. According to 'Cold War' frame scholarship, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the solidification of a dominant ideological conflict frame supporting particular US foreign policy interests served as a cultural container within which foreign issues, actors, and events were presented and understood by mainstream US news media (Giffard, 2000;Hallin, 1986Hallin, , 1987Hanson, 1995;Norris, 1995).…”

“…Personifying such processes is abundant framing research into the existence of a 'Cold War' foreign affairs news frame within mainstream US news coverage until the collapse of the Soviet Union. This scholarship identified the manner in which US international news coverage emerged within an ideological, dichotomistic perceptual lens through which all coverage of foreign events, issues and actors was understood relative to the US-Soviet conflict (Giffard, 2000;Hallin, 1986Hallin, , 1987Hanson, 1995;Norris, 1995).…”