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.

The first question (and the one that has been on my mind for some time) was put forth by Spencer Ackerman, who asked about the kind of policies we could imagine in a world without the Smith-Mundt prohibition. Interestingly, neither Matt (nor anyone else on the panel) seemed eager to address this question. Matt instead deferred to his intentions – we need to focus on the misinterpretation of the act and the lack of awareness for why it was enacted in the first place in 1948. Even so, I feel that Ackerman’s question is valid – just what kind of public diplomacy and international communication could the U.S. engage in if it could involve and “target” the American people?

David Firestein offered two important points along these lines. First, he argued that the symbolic division between domestic and foreign audiences could undermine U.S. credibility. If foreign audiences perceive that the information reaching them is not suitable for American audiences – could that negatively impact perception of such messaging? Second, he suggested that an important audience for U.S. information activities could be diasporic populations living in the United States. The significant presence of immigrants represent an obvious resource for reaching broader global audiences – yet this is barred by Smith-Mundt’s prohibition.

George Clack related some humorous stories about how his department has to navigate around the prohibition in order to help US students who wish to use its resources to do school work, and offered two interesting observations. First, in response to a question from Patricia Kushlis of Whirled View – he worried that a removal of the dissemination ban might muddle the divisions between messages designed for foreign audiences, and those that already are released to explain policies to the American people. Basically, he argued that the U.S. needs to retain its capacity to tailor its publications and messages to specific audiences, and not have that process be subsumed by the production of domestic, political talking points. Second, he concluded that the future of U.S. diplomacy will be defined by the notion of “dialogue” – and that the Department of State should embrace Web 2.0 technologies such as Twitter and other social networking tools.

I suggested that the State Department is already moving in the direction of circumventing Smith-Mundt – by embracing modalities that involve social networking. As I have argued, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Glassman’s “public diplomacy 2.0″ signifies such a shift – where the U.S. is not so much concerned with monologic message management as it is in facilitating dialogue within populations critical to U.S. foreign policy objectives. If the US State Department is moving towards embracing the collaborative potentials of an “open source” public diplomacy, then the Smith-Mundt act seems even more antiquated in its ban on information dissemination.

Nevertheless, I still wonder how a Smith-Mundt revision could specifically yield particular policies, programs, and efforts (outside of the diasporic plan) that would considerably transform our current public diplomacy. At best, I think that revisiting Smith-Mundt means acknowledging the context of its original passage – and how it central it was to establishing a capacity to inform global audiences at a time when arguably “good” U.S. policies like the Marshall Plan were being drowned out by Soviet propaganda. Now, Smith-Mundt is a curiosity, and attention to public diplomacy is somewhat of a niche interest. What Matt is likely arguing for is that revisiting Smith-Mundt forces us to reconsider the policies that the U.S. seeks to defend, promote, and explain. When the U.S. had a “good” set of policies, we needed informational lines of defense. In the waning days of the Bush administration, there has been little impetus to revisit the policies that speak louder than public diplomacy – and thus public diplomacy remains “lipstick on a pig.” With an incoming administration – the possibilities for a revised Smith-Mundt and a renewed vision for U.S. public diplomacy are encouraging. Removing the ban won’t single-handedly revitalize U.S. public diplomacy – but serious legislative and executive attention to the broader process of communication and advocacy is a step in the right direction towards a coherent attitude about strategic communication.

For those concerned with the possibilities of removing a “ban on propaganda,” I think it’s important to remember that the potential disadvantages of dismantling the Smith-Mundt prohibition will not necessarily entail the rise of a domestic propaganda agency in the United States. Let’s face it – we already are awash in propaganda – (see Lance Bennett’s “indexing hypothesis” if you desire an ideologically neutral explanation). Those who fear this should recognize that domestic propaganda from the government is non-unique to Smith-Mundt. We already get it in press briefings, video press releases, public service announcements, and the Sunday talk-show circuit. And Smith-Mundt is almost certainly not responsible for the “indexing” of foreign news to government sources that already constrain media-acquired knowledge of foreign affairs. (Anyone impressed with the U.S. media’s coverage of the Gaza conflict?) If anything, removing Smith-Mundt’s prohibition might open up new channels for perspectives on foreign affairs from the government – outside the existing political channels and talking points filtered through the commercial media.

That said, I still believe that advocates for changing the Smith-Mundt prohibition need to do more to envision what kind of policies could be crafted without the ban. It’s fine for us to follow Matt’s lead in recognizing the historical context of the Act’s origins – we needed information programs to promote our policies at the dawn of the Cold War. Yes, people were less concerned then about the government propagandizing U.S. citizens than the government crowding out commercial news outlets and the specter of communists at the State Department. These observations make for interesting historical insight, and shows how our perspective on the Act has changed over time. But what exactly do we DO with this act now? Is the act merely an inconvenience, a factor to work around in the practice of creating messages for foreign audiences, or is the act as serious impediment to a better U.S. public diplomacy? While there is growing recognition that the act may be out of date, I don’t think we fully grasp the costs and benefits of reversing the ban. For now, revisiting the ban is likely a vehicle for reasserting the strategic importance of global engagement and communication.