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.