Intermap

By Craig Hayden

So it’s been almost a week since the informative and evidently well-attended Symposium on the Smith Mundt Act of 1948: A Discourse on America’s Discourse. Hats off to Matt Armstrong for putting together this fascinating event. I’ve had some time to digest my notes on the event, and there are few things that stand out in my assessment of the Symposium and what it means for U.S. public diplomacy. I won’t spend too much time on the Act’s dissemination ban, which prevents the U.S. government (ostensibly parts that communicate to foreign publics) from exposing U.S. citizens to the content it produces. While this was discussed at the symposium, most of the basic arguments are covered here. Suffice to say, the conference grew to be much more than a meditation on this artifact of Cold War legislation. Here are some basic takeaways:

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by Craig Hayden

The AOC held a Journalist Series roundtable discussion on “Revisiting the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948.” yesterday, in advance of the forthcoming Smith-Mundt Symposium on Jan 13th, 2009 – “A Discourse to Shape America’s Discourse.” Four participants were featured, along with a series of journalists, bloggers, and academics participating via teleconference. The four highlighted speakers included Mr. Matt Armstrong (aka Mountainrunner), principal and co-founder of Armstrong Strategic Insights Group (ASIG) and the driving force behind the January 13th symposium, Mr. George Clack, Director of the Office of Publications in the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (DOS-IIP); RADM Greg Smith, US Central Command (CENTCOM), and David Firestein, Senior Advisor to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

This event, which I attended in person, was an interesting public forum for Matt Armstrong, who has been on a crusade to inform the foreign policy establishment about the problems with Smith-Mundt, and how our contemporary interpretation of its ban on the USIA (and now, the U.S. Dept. of State) from propagandizing American citizens. Matt’s basic argument is that the federal government currently interprets Smith-Mundt as a “firewall” between foreign and domestic dissemination of information – an increasingly difficult proposition in the age of the internet. For Matt, the original intent of the act has been distorted to limit the access of U.S. citizens to the messages that the government uses to inform and persuade foreign audiences. As a result, we have an uninformed populace with virtually no access to a decidedly non-transparent process for communicating to the rest of the world. So much for democratic oversight. Matt’s imperative here is to get our foreign policy leadership to recognize that this law is not only outmoded (due to the internet), it closes off opportunity to involve those who might serve to critique the government’s efforts at public diplomacy.
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