The Future of Public Diplomacy: Cutting Out the Middleman
We, like our friends over at Daily Demarche, have been thinking a lot lately about our public diplomacy efforts. With the recent dramatic damage done to our image in the Muslim world thanks to a completely false report by Newsweek, the issue has risen to the fore of our thoughts and concerns. So, when we received a request today via email to comment on the subject, we didn’t need much prompting. We have thought of little else these recent days.
First, some provisos: we do not work in Public Diplomacy, we are still relatively new to the State Department, we are junior, untenured officers. Our perspective is therefore still essentially that of an outsider with some limited inside experience. We do not intend to pose as experts and offer only our thoughts.
Of course, this particular vantage point is not a very bad place to be on this specific topic. Since all people, especially hard-working FSOs, take pride in their work, it is very likely that any professional PD man would be a bit too wrapped up in the quotidian and essential work he performs to provide objective advice and comment. On the other hand, a total outsider lacks the great galvanizing experience of working and living abroad, and dealing with a world where perception is indeed reality. Additionally, since, as new officers, we still retain some of our civilian mind-set, we feel we are able to assess the Department’s efforts as any average American would.
From the moment we arrived in Washington, D.C., and were introduced to life at “Main State” (diplo-speak for the Harry S. Truman Building, headquarters of the Department of State) we knew we had a PD problem on our hands. Simply put, the building—a drab, quite ugly, atrociously furnished and brutally painted eyesore of a building—stands in quite nicely as an illustration of what is wrong with our approach. Like Main State, our PD programs accept too readily how we’ve always done business; like that tired old building, we have an overly practical approach that values asset lifetime and use quotients over the more hard-to-grasp value of symbolism, beauty and elegance. We view ourselves as an office, complete with scuffed linoleum walkways and harsh florescent lighting, rather than a department of the executive of the most powerful county and oldest republic in the history of mankind.
Public Diplomacy: Not So Public
Our current PD program focuses on one thing and one thing only: the press. In whatever country you choose to name, our PD officers are studying the host country’s press in the morning and spending the rest of their working day talking to reports and editors, making corrections, clarifications, suggestions, and getting stories out. When they aren’t doing that, they are prepping our people—from lowly functionaries like ourselves to the Secretary of State—for interaction with the press, drilling in talking points, pointing out topics to avoid or to stress and then, afterwards, handling the inevitable press conference.
Thus, our entire system is staked on one central theme: that there is no more important conduit to the public of host countries than that country’s press or, in the unique case of the Middle East, in the trans-national satellite channels like Al-Jazeera. But what if that central judgment is incorrect? What if we are working in a Cold War old-media mindset in a world awash with new possibilities and a very vibrant New Media?
Even our most ardent PD men and women would have to agree that if the central organizing principle of the discipline is incorrect, it doesn’t really matter that they perform difficult work often brilliantly. This is why one hears such skepticism about PD’s prospects even though Karen Hughes is a competent, thoughtful person. Even a Hughes can’t make a broken paradigm work.
And broken it indeed is. It’s not just in the United States where the prestige and power of the MSM are being called into question, it’s all around the world (or most of it). In such an environment a radical re-think of our approach is necessary. We must stop thinking of the press as a sacrosanct body of high priests who will decide whether or not to carry our message across and start thinking of our own interests. We must design an across-the-board approach that establishes an official American media presence that performs an end-run around the press and speaks directly to the people of the world. And, what’s more, this new approach must speak the language people around the world expect America to speak in, using the latest in Internet and high technology.
There will be those who would dismiss the result as “propaganda,” and, of course, unless the truly creative talents of some our colleagues in the State Department are freed from the dead hand of business-as-usual and bureaucratic regulations, the result will be yet another clone of State Magazine, which fights monthly with AFSA’s Foreign Service Journal for the title of Saddest Magazine of All Time. There is no reason why all these people, many of whom succeeded in the private sector, cannot build a respectable media outlet if they are given the tools to do the job. Fortunately for us, the building blocks are already there; we have but to use them.
Image Promotion: the Voice of America and the New Media
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Sanford J. Unger, a former NPR reporter and Voice of America director, laments the current state of PD and offers some proposed solutions. (You may find a preview of the article here). In so doing, Unger reveals all that is wrong with our current crop of leadership on this issue. Unger’s thesis is basically that, once upon a time, the U.S. Government funded a variety of English-language news programming, centered upon VoA and the old, much-lamented U.S. Information Agency, that focused on hard news, independent of what Unger calls “political interference.” He writes:
In 63 years of operation, the VoA has been a widely respected brand name, symbolizing honest international radio journalism with an American twist….Political interference in programming decisions, thought to be a thing of the past, has returned. Congressionally mandated editorials expressing the official views of the U.S. government, previously set apart, now blend into or trump objective news reports. Dispirited by the trend, some of the network’s most senior and most widely respected correspondents have retired.
One shudders to think how bad the reports on VoA must have gotten before an exasperated Congress stepped in and forced former NPR reporters to can the “objective” reporting in exchange for something that approximated the American view on current events. The idea that what we should be aiming at is a kind of left-wing NPR writ large that seeks to serve mankind with the kind of objective reporting that finds the U.N credible and our own State Department a repository of shameful lies is on its face ludicrous.
In order for any new initiative to succeed, it would have to purge this press-centric, and, thus, orthodox liberal world view and engage a new crop of New Media savvy writers, producers and directors. This would be absolutely essential to the success of any such initiative.
If such a move were harnessed to the already-existing infrastructure of VoA and the other Broadcasting Board of Governors initiatives, the USG could launch a world-wide media offensive, taking out the middlemen and their unrelenting knee-jerk assumptions. Blogsites by USAID workers in the field, newspapers produced by regional specialists, news programming that does for America what Al-Jazeera has done for Islamic Fascism, documentaries about women going to school for the first time, an international C-Span showing the world democratic process and interesting speeches, a massively increased visitor’s program to bring talented foreigners to the United States for taxpayer-paid studies, an aggressive arts program that brings American art to the world, trained and skilled debaters to represent the USG in news programs around the world. All this and more is necessary if we are to make any progress.
Unger is right about one thing: the current state of the VoA is a joke. It is badly produced, laughably written and horrifically presented. It combines the worst of status-quoism and staid bureaucracy, kind of like that Main State building. Old, out-dated, worn-out, built for yesterday’s war, a sad relic that bespeaks a loss of confidence and an inability to separate the important from the mundane.
First, some provisos: we do not work in Public Diplomacy, we are still relatively new to the State Department, we are junior, untenured officers. Our perspective is therefore still essentially that of an outsider with some limited inside experience. We do not intend to pose as experts and offer only our thoughts.
Of course, this particular vantage point is not a very bad place to be on this specific topic. Since all people, especially hard-working FSOs, take pride in their work, it is very likely that any professional PD man would be a bit too wrapped up in the quotidian and essential work he performs to provide objective advice and comment. On the other hand, a total outsider lacks the great galvanizing experience of working and living abroad, and dealing with a world where perception is indeed reality. Additionally, since, as new officers, we still retain some of our civilian mind-set, we feel we are able to assess the Department’s efforts as any average American would.
From the moment we arrived in Washington, D.C., and were introduced to life at “Main State” (diplo-speak for the Harry S. Truman Building, headquarters of the Department of State) we knew we had a PD problem on our hands. Simply put, the building—a drab, quite ugly, atrociously furnished and brutally painted eyesore of a building—stands in quite nicely as an illustration of what is wrong with our approach. Like Main State, our PD programs accept too readily how we’ve always done business; like that tired old building, we have an overly practical approach that values asset lifetime and use quotients over the more hard-to-grasp value of symbolism, beauty and elegance. We view ourselves as an office, complete with scuffed linoleum walkways and harsh florescent lighting, rather than a department of the executive of the most powerful county and oldest republic in the history of mankind.
Public Diplomacy: Not So Public
Our current PD program focuses on one thing and one thing only: the press. In whatever country you choose to name, our PD officers are studying the host country’s press in the morning and spending the rest of their working day talking to reports and editors, making corrections, clarifications, suggestions, and getting stories out. When they aren’t doing that, they are prepping our people—from lowly functionaries like ourselves to the Secretary of State—for interaction with the press, drilling in talking points, pointing out topics to avoid or to stress and then, afterwards, handling the inevitable press conference.
Thus, our entire system is staked on one central theme: that there is no more important conduit to the public of host countries than that country’s press or, in the unique case of the Middle East, in the trans-national satellite channels like Al-Jazeera. But what if that central judgment is incorrect? What if we are working in a Cold War old-media mindset in a world awash with new possibilities and a very vibrant New Media?
Even our most ardent PD men and women would have to agree that if the central organizing principle of the discipline is incorrect, it doesn’t really matter that they perform difficult work often brilliantly. This is why one hears such skepticism about PD’s prospects even though Karen Hughes is a competent, thoughtful person. Even a Hughes can’t make a broken paradigm work.
And broken it indeed is. It’s not just in the United States where the prestige and power of the MSM are being called into question, it’s all around the world (or most of it). In such an environment a radical re-think of our approach is necessary. We must stop thinking of the press as a sacrosanct body of high priests who will decide whether or not to carry our message across and start thinking of our own interests. We must design an across-the-board approach that establishes an official American media presence that performs an end-run around the press and speaks directly to the people of the world. And, what’s more, this new approach must speak the language people around the world expect America to speak in, using the latest in Internet and high technology.
There will be those who would dismiss the result as “propaganda,” and, of course, unless the truly creative talents of some our colleagues in the State Department are freed from the dead hand of business-as-usual and bureaucratic regulations, the result will be yet another clone of State Magazine, which fights monthly with AFSA’s Foreign Service Journal for the title of Saddest Magazine of All Time. There is no reason why all these people, many of whom succeeded in the private sector, cannot build a respectable media outlet if they are given the tools to do the job. Fortunately for us, the building blocks are already there; we have but to use them.
Image Promotion: the Voice of America and the New Media
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Sanford J. Unger, a former NPR reporter and Voice of America director, laments the current state of PD and offers some proposed solutions. (You may find a preview of the article here). In so doing, Unger reveals all that is wrong with our current crop of leadership on this issue. Unger’s thesis is basically that, once upon a time, the U.S. Government funded a variety of English-language news programming, centered upon VoA and the old, much-lamented U.S. Information Agency, that focused on hard news, independent of what Unger calls “political interference.” He writes:
In 63 years of operation, the VoA has been a widely respected brand name, symbolizing honest international radio journalism with an American twist….Political interference in programming decisions, thought to be a thing of the past, has returned. Congressionally mandated editorials expressing the official views of the U.S. government, previously set apart, now blend into or trump objective news reports. Dispirited by the trend, some of the network’s most senior and most widely respected correspondents have retired.
One shudders to think how bad the reports on VoA must have gotten before an exasperated Congress stepped in and forced former NPR reporters to can the “objective” reporting in exchange for something that approximated the American view on current events. The idea that what we should be aiming at is a kind of left-wing NPR writ large that seeks to serve mankind with the kind of objective reporting that finds the U.N credible and our own State Department a repository of shameful lies is on its face ludicrous.
In order for any new initiative to succeed, it would have to purge this press-centric, and, thus, orthodox liberal world view and engage a new crop of New Media savvy writers, producers and directors. This would be absolutely essential to the success of any such initiative.
If such a move were harnessed to the already-existing infrastructure of VoA and the other Broadcasting Board of Governors initiatives, the USG could launch a world-wide media offensive, taking out the middlemen and their unrelenting knee-jerk assumptions. Blogsites by USAID workers in the field, newspapers produced by regional specialists, news programming that does for America what Al-Jazeera has done for Islamic Fascism, documentaries about women going to school for the first time, an international C-Span showing the world democratic process and interesting speeches, a massively increased visitor’s program to bring talented foreigners to the United States for taxpayer-paid studies, an aggressive arts program that brings American art to the world, trained and skilled debaters to represent the USG in news programs around the world. All this and more is necessary if we are to make any progress.
Unger is right about one thing: the current state of the VoA is a joke. It is badly produced, laughably written and horrifically presented. It combines the worst of status-quoism and staid bureaucracy, kind of like that Main State building. Old, out-dated, worn-out, built for yesterday’s war, a sad relic that bespeaks a loss of confidence and an inability to separate the important from the mundane.
