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:

1) The dissemination ban contained in the Smith-Mundt Act was for many an irrelevance. While the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy had anecdotal evidence of the ban being an impediment for public diplomacy officers at the State Department, it seemed the ban was not a big deal for many former international broadcasting (IB) practitioners as well as practitioners of what we could nominally call PD within the Defense Department. George Clack (from the State Department’s IIP) relayed the circuitous process by which he can tell people about the State Dept’s IIP publications, the ban on dissemination of information to U.S. citizens was generally viewed as irrelevant to the business of PD by the participants. There were some exceptions of course. Some members of the audience who worked in other government agencies shared frustrations about how the ban had stymied their own efforts to reach the American people. And Marc Lynch wondered aloud if a stricter ban was indeed called for. At the end of the day, even Matt Armstrong admitted as much – he suggested the most pressing issue is to consider what kind of leadership on “global engagement” may be necessary now, decades after Smith-Mundt and seven years of globally unpopular U.S. foreign polices.

2) The difference of perspective between what we might call “traditional” PD experts, usually from the ranks of the former USIA (retired or otherwise), and those charged with implementing new policies of public diplomacy. The many insightful speakers with experience in international broadcasting cleaved to a normative vision of its mission – that IB’s integrity as a journalistic outlet would be the basis of its effectiveness. Credibility for these speakers was the key asset for U.S. public diplomacy. Barry Zorthian rather directly stated that IB was distinct from cultural, exchange, and “information projection” (what Nicholas Cull might call “media advocacy”). These are lumped together as “public diplomacy” for budgetary convenience. I don’t think this is too far afield at all from what Kim Andrew Elliott often says about IB. For IB to “work” – it can’t really be seen as propagandistic public diplomacy.

Yet “Public Diplomacy” seemed like a wholly other set of strategies when described by the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman, the former Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense (and now State Department advisor) Mike Doran, or even the twitterific Colleen Graffy. Glassman again reiterated his “public diplomacy 2.0” orientation, where U.S. public diplomacy facilitates global relationships to achieve broader policy objectives, rather than simply focus on explaining and defending U.S. policies. Tellingly, he also invoked George Kennan’s call for a U.S. public educated on the scope of the ideological challenge it faced at the dawn of the Cold War – perhaps suggesting the U.S. find ways to work with, or around, aspects of the Smith-Mundt ban that is detrimental to public understanding of U.S. policies and strategies.

The apparent disconnect between the IB and the Advocacy / Strategic Communication perspective reflects the continued lack of definitional clarity for public diplomacy. Public Diplomacy (PD) is a widely inclusive term, yet it includes policies that are at some level antithetical. While this undercurrent was pervasive at the conference, one moment in particular stood out for me. Doran’s keynote emphasized that U.S. efforts need to be strategic, rather than ad hoc, reactive, or without focus. PD needs to serve the needs of U.S. policies. It’s more than simply telling America’s story. That mission during the Cold War era of PD was a different context – now there is no poverty of information and media content. Indeed U.S. adversaries have even been successful in getting their message into the American media. There was much to Doran’s speech which I won’t entail here, but I think it’s important to note his stance towards the “strategic” and how to effect influence.

Doran was clearly focused on “influence” – whether by direct or “networked” means; (or to use another framework – central or peripheral routes to persuasion). Doran’s depiction of the global media ecology reflected a shift in expectations of media effect and audience attitudes towards media. Simply put, during the Cold War, audiences were “deferential” to arguments made via media. Credibility and authority were not particularly controversial. Now, however, there is a delegitimation of authority in media texts. Audiences are no longer deferential to media-based arguments – they are referential. Their attitudes towards media content are conditioned by the networks and relationships they are embedded within. As Doran stated, info is “cheap” – yet credibility and trust are elusive amidst the panoply of choices and the competition among media representations.

Doran’s emphasis here is that audiences for media advocacy programs tend to trust local, credible voices and are typically concerned with themselves. Therefore, it is crucial for the U.S. to engage in what Glassman calls “active understanding” and to develop third-parties that can speak for the strategic interests of the United States without being eclipsed by the “messenger” (that is, an unpopular U.S.). The U.S. therefore needs to “spawn cognates.”

Doran’s arguments were couched in a larger statement about the need for a coordinated bureaucratic engagement with PD (though he clarified, this was not meant to endorse a new “agency”). But throughout Doran’s speech – it was clear the emphasis was on reaching audiences with some sort of message, via a message strategy that accounted for contemporary and localized media consumption practices. In basic terms – Doran clarified a need for better strategic communication strategy. He did not, however, appeal to the normative vision of international broadcasting. When one audience member from the VOA asked where IB would fit into this new way of practicing public diplomacy – he declined to elaborate.

Doran’s adpative, network-inspired vision for crafting PD strategies doesn’t exactly fit with traditional IB. One could argue that it is fundamentally at odds with the purpose of IB, and the expected gains that IB brings for the United States. I would clarify that the differences here seem to be more matters of policy intent – rather than of world view. There was mutual agreement that the context for PD had changed. Indeed, Barry Zorthian reiterated his claim that the U.S. is “exposed” in this contemporary global media environment. Yet the “what to do about it” questions have fundamentally different answers. Doran’s track would re-orient U.S. capacities to develop novel methods of engaging U.S. audiences to achieve influence effects – by proxy or otherwise. This strategy would embrace the capacities of social networking and seek local routes to influence rather than impose broadcast messaging. Fundamentally, however, this vision of PD is ultimately about advocacy. The other track discussed at the conference would emphasize the benefits of a strengthened international broadcasting program, that would seek to repair its image as a credible journalistic outfit and restore an undistorted image about the U.S. in the process.

I’m not convinced these two perspectives are necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive per se. But they do indicate that U.S. “public diplomacy” is a big conceptual tent – harboring different practical and perhaps even ethical perspectives on international communication. Reconciling these visions may be the most challenging aspect of “global engagement” at an implementation level. The last panel at the symposium featured members of Congress, talking about the problems facing legislative action on public diplomacy. Looming budgetary limitations and little in the way of domestic constituents for public diplomacy means questions of strategy and policy are much more salient.

I think the conference was most illuminating in this regard. The intersection of strategic debate and bureaucratic inertia suggest the contemporary challenges for crafting public diplomacy – and the consequences of this debate will manifest in allocation of policy resources and eventually, views of the United States abroad. Ultimately, the airing of differing perspectives on what to do about U.S. “discourse” reveal the fault-lines of perspectives that must be reconciled in the new administration – the institutional boundaries, motivations, and expectations for U.S. international communication. I think we caught a glimpse at this symposium of an emergent governing discourse, an internal formation for what the new leadership can do for public diplomacy.

There were other topics that got serious attention at the event: the institutional problems with PD professionals and advancement, the decline of international journalism, domestic propaganda, and the roadblocks inherent in the legislative process of changing (and paying for) public diplomacy. Ideally I’ll cover them more in later posts.