Intermap

by Craig Hayden

Here are some questions I pose to Matt Armstrong, and others who support a serious rework of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. What kind of benefits could the United States expect if it abolished, amended, or otherwise changed Smith-Mundt? If U.S. citizens could see what their government was broadcasting to other countries, would this result in better public diplomacy and strategic communication? Would international broadcasting improve if its content was open to public scrutiny?

I am on board with the argument that Smith-Mundt is a dated piece of legislation. The realities of media globalization and ubiquitous information networks reflect a very different world from the time it was passed into law. But I wonder if these very same realities obviate the need to change the law. American citizens can already communicate directly, access government materials indirectly, and remain connected to foreign publics through networks sustained by global information technologies. Do we need a new law to say, “okay, we get it, now here’s what your government is doing?”

Of course as a researcher, I am all for removing barriers to study public diplomacy. Given the tenuous status of FoIA requests these days, I think there are important reasons to increase transparency in public diplomacy and strat comm programs. Not only will some scholars gladly contribute to “improve the messsge.” Others could provide informed, critical perspectives that check group-think assumptions that can infiltrate foreign policy thinking. And I think there is a need for truly critical, ethically-minded research that balances the research of enthusiasts. Such pluralism could only help reflect the values that the U.S. is trying to communicate. Why not expand the range of input and scholarship?

But I think what Matt is getting at is more than just exposing U.S. message strategy to academics and policy wonks. It’s about involvement in a larger process of policy awareness, feedback, and input with synergistic effects on outflow of U.S. messages to the rest of the world. Implicit in Matt’s rethinking of Smith-Mundt is an invitation for Americans into the process of crafting, conducting, and implementing public diplomacy. It’s putting the public back into public diplomacy. (Ok, that was cheesy).

This implicit expansion of the policy community, however, would be a fundamental shift in how policy is crafted and implemented in this country. Unlike domestic policy, the constituents for foreign policy (let alone public diplomacy) are less than obvious. Sure, we know generally that public opinion does matter to policy leaders, and that interest networks can shape policy construction. But foreign policy shaped by public opinion doesn’t necessarily make it democratic. And an open-sourced public diplomacy goes against historical trends in the domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy.

And what about the troubling trends in poor reporting of international affairs? Does an invitational public diplomacy correct or account for the state of public awareness of international or global issues? We will suddenly become more informed citizens, capable of contributing to the “effort” of communicating to the rest of the world? We already know that there’s a demographic of people, interest publics, that represent the principal audience for foreign news. Maybe a broader, more inclusive public diplomacy would not only involves these people, but activate previously untapped networks of those who would like to “contribute” in some way.

In any case, I’d certainly like to see some more elaborate scenarios of a post-Smith Mundt public diplomacy for the U.S.

by Craig Hayden

Matt Armstrong’s recent essay posted over on the Small Wars Journal represents a clear and historically-grounded case for revisiting the viability of the Smith-Mundt legislation - which forbids the U.S. government from exposing its citizens to the nation’s foreign communication efforts. I think what’s vitally important about this essay is that it highlights the historical intent of the prohibition. According to Matt’s research, Smith-Mundt was initially intended (in 1948) to allay fears of government competition with private news agencies, and marginalize the voice of the State Department (which was suspected of being rife with communist sympathizers).

Matt’s ongoing project on Smith-Mundt is a vital check on the inertia of commonplace assumptions about why we have Smith-Mundt in the first place. It was not intended to inoculate Americans from government propaganda. Yet this aversion to government propaganda remains a crucial component of Sharon Weinberger’s well-developed, articulate rebuttal to Matt’s argument. For Matt, we need to ammend Smith-Mundt because it is a historical relic; in a global network society, how can the U.S. enforce a firewall on information that flows freely across multiple media platforms. If I speak Arabic, I can listen to Radio Sawa online, or watched streamed videos of Al-Hurra. The same goes for the VOA online programs. So why the ban? If anything, it inserts institutional impediments that diminish the input of Americans to what the U.S. communicates abroad. More on this in a later post.

I think Weinberger’s 3-part post is well-worth a read. It’s chock full of significant (and debatable) arguments about strategic communication and the utility of public diplomacy. For this post, I’ll focus on one in particular. Weinberger argues that removing Smith-Mundt would open the door to create institutions of domestic propaganda. Steven Corman’s developed defense of Matt’s essay observes that we already have such institutions within the U.S. government - that frequently propagandize the citizenry (Assuming, for the moment, that we equate “propaganda” with a campaign of advocacy that is a selective representation of facts and persuasive elements to gain popular assent).

Weinberger’s argument about propaganda is logically a slippery slope fallacy. There are no obvious reasons why a domestic information ministry would spring to existence after Smith-Mundt is scrapped. Why should it? As research has shown for decades, the U.S. press has shown little inclination to represent the rest of the world from a perspective other than U.S. policy-makers (this is supported by Bennett’s well-known “Indexing Hypothesis“). In fact, as Dan Hallin has shown, critical coverage only tends to arise when there is disagreement among policy-makers (see Piers Robinson’s piece on media and politics for a summary). We don’t have to be closet fans of Herman and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” to realize that the U.S. news media rarely strays from the government line. So what is there to fear from abandoning Smith-Mundt?

Following Steven Corman, I think that to imagine U.S. citizens as rational, informed subjects under siege by a government propaganda machine is to ignore the reality of interpretation and agenda-setting in news today. If we are, in fact, to fear something about news media information and persuasion, it is the enduring gloss of objectivity that U.S. news agencies continue to enjoy. Sure, many recognize (and embrace) the partisan “corrective” offered by Fox News. But for many the news is still a prism that is not obviously advertised as the voice of the elite or the government. Whether we fully trust our news or not, we still rely on it - even if our news is increasingly a patchwork of mainstream, blog, and comedic outlets.

Also, it is worth reiterating that Steve Corman says we need to update our assumptions about how news is socially constructed before we start fearing government propaganda. Persuasion has always been a part of news construction, well before the days when Lippmann tried to assert a kind of scientific ethic on the practice of journalism, when our collective early 20th century anxieties about public relations forced the news profession to reconsider the “truthiness” of news. In other words, American’s are no strangers to selective representation in news.

At the same time, I would add we should update our conceptions of what news does to people, and concurrently what people do with news. U.S. communication research abandoned basic sender-receiver models of information transmission decades ago. I don’t think it’s too optimistic to think that contemporary, info and technology saturated (and some might add, cynical) American media consumers are discerning enough to recognize that U.S. government communication is a perspective amongst many. To deny this is to question the ability of Americans to be critical media consumers. Of course I will hedge my bets here by saying that the U.S. was (and is) sensitive to news portrayal of foreign affairs. The tremendous support for the U.S. war in Iraq in 2002-2003, concurrent with uncritical coverage of the impending war, demonstrates this. I just think we need to evaluate this sensitivity, before we imagine an Orwellian nightmare world unleashed on American democracy after Smith-Mundt is updated.

So do we need Smith-Mundt? If it’s a barrier to improving how the U.S. communicates to the rest of the world, and impedes the input of those who could contribute or evaluate the “message” - then it needs serious rethinking. The reality is, American media already has considerable problems with propaganda. As Robert McChesney’s research suggests, we already live in a virtual propaganda state. Let’s focus on one serious communication problem at a time.

by Craig Hayden

Here’s a quick thought, inspired by my struggle to find time to blog amidst getting my classes planned and my household moved. In basic undergraduate argumentation courses, students learn some very simple criteria for analyzing arguments (in debate, in dialogue, in court cases, etc.). They include such classics as “relevance,” “sufficiency,” and, for the purpose of this post - “recency.”

When we consider the rapid diffusion of information across informal and mediated networks used by terrorists, let alone communities of opinion that nations engaging in public diplomacy might want to “reach” - it begs the question about whether the U.S. (or another large, state entity) could turn on a dime to respond both quickly and with information that passes the recency test. Recency does not imply whether information provided is truly contemporary. Some information may be “timeless” per se - but other information becomes useless in the context of rapidly changing “facts on the ground.” A classic example from arg classes: last year’s stock data may be somewhat useless for arguments made about yesterday’s stock market performance.

The U.S. State Department operates a Rapid Response center, leveraging useful open source data to provide policy-makers with relatively up-to-date distillations of arguments in foreign media. But I’m not sure the domain of the Rapid Response Force extends to the crafting of messages in public diplomacy. Information Operations outside the purview of State operate in this time-frame - but what about the above-board capacity to react not only quickly, but with evidence that meets the burdens of the recency test (let alone relevance.). The State Department operates its Regional Media Hubs, and this obviously is an important step towards a capacity to communicate in real-time, as an interlocuter within global info flows. But do the constraints of message management obviate the expected outcome of any message the remotely resembles “talking points.” I noted in the previous post the insight from the 2007 RAND study, “Enlisting Madison Avenue” about how the message needs to managed better across the strategic to tactical levels. While it doesn’t exactly address the burdens of recency, it does suggest more intelligent message coordination.

But does the cost of message coordination come at the price of being perceived as too “strategic” in strategic communication, let alone the public diplomacy of daily media management? I guess these really are two questions - but I think they start to get at the problem of a commitment to a dialogue-centric public diplomacy policy that remains structured by political imperatives. Messages issuing forth from such a system run the risk of being both “out of touch/untimely” and “obviously manipulative and calculated.” I suppose this fuels the arguments for a more distinct separation between strategic communication and public diplomacy in general.