Image Is Everything

There's a very interesting opinion/analysis piece in today's New York Times magazine, that contains this intriguing paragraph:

We are locked once again in a war of ideas. And public-diplomacy enthusiasts would have us gird ourselves once again with the weapons of advocacy. But the political weapons of the cold war are as antiquated today as the military ones. The 1950s witnessed the birth in the non-Western world of mass media as well as mass politics. The U.S. could dominate the airwaves not only of South Vietnam but even of Japan, as Osgood describes; and we could thereby reach the small but growing segment of society engaged in political discussion. That world is gone forever. Today, as the Djerejian report observed, “Arabs and Muslims have a surfeit of opinion and information about the United States.” We are bound to lose any battle of spin control, whether carried out by a pal of the president or by the most credible Arabic-speaking proxy.

From this we may draw two opposite conclusions. One is that we must simply accept that the cost of acting in our national interest is that publics in the Islamic world will shower us with contempt. The alternative is to recognize that public opinion is the medium in which we now operate. All diplomacy is therefore public diplomacy. When Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials split hairs over torture, that shapes our ability to conduct the war on terror more powerfully than do the interrogation techniques themselves. What we say about ourselves no longer has much effect; but what we are seen doing — on occasion, what we are caught doing — matters immensely.

(emphasis added) That last sentence sums all that up nicely: it no longer matters what we say in private to world leaders whom we are trying to persuade, but what we do in public.

This is a new paradigm brought on, I believe (and as James Traub examines) by the rapidly changing face of what passes for mass media in not only this country, but the world. Time was, we could beam Radio Free Europe behind the Iron Curtain and be guaranteed to reach a mass audience, despite the technological sophistication of the Soviet Union in blocking signals. Better still, our only competition in passing along information was the state-run media. We ran on equal footing, which gave us equal access to the audience and allowed the audience itself to choose which information to receive.

Now, not so much. In a world dominated by media of a more personalized, more localized nature, the Internet, e-mail, blogs and websites, we're fighting a new diplomatic battle with old tools. People aren't gathering as much information from mass media, which is now more entertainment-oriented anyway. "American Idol" reaches people that would shun "60 Minutes", and these people are forming their opinions from opinion makers who "are in the know", who post blogs from talking points disseminated from a central core of information.

Sort of like how the Republicans operate Fox News and the right wing fringe bloggers in this country. In our own nation, where 100% of people have free access to *some* form of information, nearly a quarter are still operating under the delusion that George W. Bush is a good man.

Ratchet that scenario around a bit, and you can see how Pakistan, for all the blatherings about free elections and the treaties signed between Musharraf and the warlords, is still under siege by radical Pakistanis and their Islamist allies. It doesn't take much: all it really takes is a neighbor to say "I read on Al-Jazeera's website that the US is secretly sending troops into Kashmir", and that's the end of all the public pomp.

As with all mass media, taking this informal information dissemination system apart to figure out how to subvert it (like was done using "Radio Free Europe") is going to take some time. How do you create an alternative information system in what amounts to a closed loop?

This is why Traub's point is so incisive: we cannot afford publicity of the sort the Bush administration has so disingenuously and flagrantly thrown around: waterboarding isn't torture, it's an enhanced interrogation technique; we're winning in Iraq; we will stop Al Qaeda by killing civilians in a country where Al Qaeda didn't exist until we invaded.

It doesn't matter what the inarticulate bastard in the Oval Office says, even if he is perfectly misunderestimated. In the case of international relations, specifically in advancing the cause of freedom, what we say is not nearly as important as what we do. And we are years behind the curve in advancing our cause in this fashion.

Particularly when your public "statements" have amounted to as series of embarrassing bungles:

In [Karen Hughes'] first appearance in the Middle East, in 2005, this Bush confidante and fellow Texan avoided substantive issues while reassuring audiences that “my most important title is Mom” and that Americans “greatly value many religious faiths.” The trip was a very public fiasco for the White House; thereafter, Hughes appears to have been largely withdrawn from circulation.

Hughes was not the first casualty of the administration’s attempts to improve America’s global image. That distinction belongs to Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenue executive who produced and broadcast throughout the Middle East a series of uplifting video clips called “Muslim Life in America.” Beers retired for “health reasons” in 2003 after the campaign was widely ridiculed in the Arab press. She was succeeded by Margaret Tutwiler, a former State Department official, who was welcomed with great fanfare and who stepped down after a few months.

See, we're no longer trying to persuade a people to join in uprising against a monolithic imperialistic faceless tyranny.

That's Al Qaeda's domain, and they seem to be doing a pretty good job of painting America in the 21st Century as the Soviet Union. No, we're trying to prevent people from joining in an uprising by putting a face on our nation, a name to our freedoms, and revealing the true heart of the American people, that we recognize tyranny and are prepared to deal with it and join with the rest of the world in shunning it, that we dislike governments that bully and restrict and harm the powerless and poor.

That's a message, I fear, that we can't establish from the government we have, or the government we will elect. That's going to have to come from we, the people.

Great Article

I really should link to my Actor212 Media Network sources more often. I don't, but I should.

I found an interview at Internationalist Magazine yesterday that I wanted to share with you. Dr. Peter Phillips of Project Censored, a media watchdog and accountability group, said something that made me take a step back, because in a phrase, he summed up my anger at the mainstream media:

Q: When it comes to covering Anne Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, etc. would these mass media companies be remiss if they didn't constantly give the public what it supposedly wants?

We could set up cocaine sales booths on campuses and they would be very popular as well. But we have laws against that. Corporate media has abdicated their responsibility to the First Amendment to keep us informed about what the powerful are doing. We need public financed media to fill the role.

Now, Dr. Phillips and Project Censored make some pretty wild and inaccurate claims about what a "news story" is (as an example, Dr. Phillips cites Building 7 at the World Trade Center as a missed story, which it clearly was not), however, he has a point in that forests of paper were spent on Anna Nicole, but not few words were said about the Congolese genocide, which over the past ten years was as extensive as the slaughter in the Holocaust.

Read the rest here. Internationalist Mag should get the bulk of your eyeball time on this.

The Media Is The Massage

Finally, the Imus flap is over, to no one's great relief, except maybe Imus. A minor uproar in the American social dialogue has closed, and has seen the fall of a broadcasting icon, as well as the near death of a governor.

Not much positive comes out of this mess, except perhaps the vow by Al Sharpton that Imus will only be the first to go. Praise God if Sharpton keeps this vow, but Sharpton has been a little less than diligent in filling his promises. Lots of mouth, little action, and the scale is more than counterbalanced by how badly he has hurt the African American community with his own hijinks.

And I say that as someone who very nearly voted for him for governor a few elections back.

See, here's the thing: the media gets away with what it gets away with because, in truth, it sells. Imus was not a radio personality. He was a vehicle through which GM and GE and Staples and others pushed product. You listened to Imus and for free, you got more advertising pushed at you. Imus knew this and was not afraid to utilize this equation to his advantage, legally even.

Imus had been on the air 35 years or so, between his New York and Cleveland gigs (among others), and has been fired before for unbecoming conduct, usually centering around the fact he was an addict and just never showed up for work. He must have been doing something...well, not right, but profitable, for big corporations like RCA and Viacom, and later, GE to take chances on his behavior.

Roll the dice. For the last twenty years or so, people have managed to look the other way, or even offer enough grudging support to keep him on the air, toiling in the name of Mammon.

IF the firing of Imus creates an opening that leads to the wholesale clearance of "personalities" from our airwaves like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter (among many others), then I say "Huzzah!" for in truth, Imus was the least among these and probably the easiest to get rid of.

After all, technically, his was a sports show, and partisan politics was a secondary topic. His listeners were less rabid enthusiasts of his views than the Dittoheads and Hannitybots, and put up less of a fight.

These other, filthier, more disgusting proselytizers for perverse pulchritudes, espousing viewpoints of "correctness" that would be more at home in Stalinist Russia than America, won't go as quietly as Imus did.

But go they must, if we are to be true to this mission of making the airwaves safe for democracy. Al Sharpton seems to be vowing to take this boycott movement to the advertisers, taking a page out of the neo-conservative playbook of "if we don't like something, we'll force it off the air," a la Terry Rakolta, and Focus on Family.

I don't see it happening, because what should come out of this incident, the dialogue that really needs to be held, is about respect for people, for differences, for tolerance. And moreover, for understanding that this nation is undergoing an unstoppable transformation from a bastion of white male uberpower, shifting the balance of the world's resources --both physical and ethereal-- to a minority (on a global basis), to one that recognizes that people of all nations and cultures have an equal say in the future of this planet, and that this planet cannot be artificially divided into arbitrary political boundaries.

Ironically, it was the founding of the United States that signalled this evolution.

The media will b a powerful tool in this. We've seen the slow evolution on our TV screens (and its not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough) of anthropologic evidence of this transformation. Right now, it's mostly token gestures, but in the not too distant future, we'll stop seeing tokens and start seeing reflections of the world as it exists outside of our isolated island of immunity from the world's reality.

Firing Imus may, oddly enough, be the trigger for this, but given the power of his voice, if he had truly seen the light (and I suspect he has), silencing that voice may eventually do more harm than good.

tags technorati : Imus media