Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
US-engineered TV messages won't win Arab hearts and minds by Seth Fein 
Straits Times, MAY 11, 2004 US-engineered TV messages won't win Arab hearts and minds By Seth Fein NEW HAVEN (Connecticut) - Last week, United States President George W. Bush appeared on two Arabic-language satellite television stations to address recent revelations about the abuse of prisoners under US authority in Iraq. One, Al-Arabiya, is based in Dubai, the other, Al-Hurra, in Washington. The need to make discrete presentations - on a commercially successful, Arab-owned network and a US government-run system loudly broadcast Washington's mass-media dilemma: the only credible source of international information is one that is responsive to a Middle Eastern public, not Washington foreign policy, but such an outlet is unlikely to be reliably pro-American. On Feb 14, the Bush administration launched a Middle Eastern television network, publicly known as Al-Hurra ('the free one'). The 24-hour news station broadcasts programmes developed in its Washington-area headquarters for transmission throughout the Middle East. The administration frames its enterprise idealistically, promising that communication through the air can transform societies on the ground. Al-Hurra, the government's pitch goes, will deliver an alternative to what Washington views as the anti-US bias that pervades the region's television. In doing so, its programming will supposedly cultivate latent economic and political progress as it wins hearts and minds. In an exclusive interview for Al-Hurra's inaugural broadcast, Mr Bush asserted that, in Iraq, 'today a free society has started to float to the surface'. However, Al-Hurra's development suggests less an expression of Middle Eastern public opinion from below than Washington's messages from above. Even as US foreign policy touts its version of globalisation - as a dialectical relationship between free trade and free thought - it moves outside the market to marginalise disruptive mass-media perspectives created by the very international interplay of supply and demand that it trumpets. In doing so, it strikingly diminishes the rhetoric Mr Bush invoked in last January's State of the Union speech, when he asked Congress 'to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy', to help the Middle East develop, among other things, 'free markets' and a 'free press'. The static produced by the contradictions between Washington's current international broadcasting ventures and its neoliberal ideology seems to replay the 1960s, when US Information Agency (USIA) unattributed television activities in Latin America flouted modernisation theory's promise that capitalist reforms would deliver democracy and sovereignty, as well as economic development and social progress, to Third World countries. FEAR OF NEGATIVE OPINION WHAT 'modernisation' was to Cold War liberalism during the 1960s, 'globalisation' has been to post-Cold War neoliberalism since the 1990s. In each era, Washington's deployment of international television has disregarded the tenets of the official ideology it broadcasts. On Sunday evenings in the 1960s, television viewers throughout Latin America could tune in to Panorama Panamericano, a weekly news programme filmed in the US and shipped south for local broadcast. The same USIA studio quietly produced two versions of the newscast - one in Spanish, the other in Portuguese - each with its own native-speaking anchorman. The programme's authorship went unattributed, and its introductory and concluding segments made no mention of its secret patron. With the appointment of television news icon Edward Murrow as USIA director in 1961, US propaganda decisively entered the television age, seeking to sell the new administration's Alliance for Progress as a liberal alternative to socialist revolution in Latin America, as the road from underdevelopment and totalitarianism to prosperity and freedom. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency that, in 1999, succeeded the USIA, operates Al-Hurra with native-speaking talent from throughout the world and funds supplied by the US taxpayer - to the tune of US$60 million (S$103 million), more than all other BBG projects combined. It intends its suburban Virginia studio to be the hub of an international system of Middle Eastern TV production. And like Cold War (and pre-Cold War) US international information initiatives, Al-Hurra draws on talent from private-sector US culture industries. Its chief proponent has been former president Bill Clinton's BBG appointee Norman Pattiz, chairman of Westwood One, the largest US radio network. Amid these similarities, there is an important difference between each project's implementation: Panorama Panamericano was part of the USIA's covert manipulation of Latin American television, whereas the BBG has been ostentatiously overt in developing Al-Hurra. This difference in publicity, however, belies a key continuity: Each project superficially reproduces regnant rhetoric as its actual implementation contradicts not only stated ideals but also presumed goals. The Bush administration has clearly announced that its objective in developing Al-Hurra is to counter the world's most-watched Arabic-language source of televised news, Al-Jazeera, with a station controlled by Washington. Moreover, Al-Hurra's development implicitly recognises the Qatar-based, 24-hour satellite network's popular legitimacy as an independent source of news and opinion. Hence, Al-Hurra represents less Washington's distrust of commercial Middle Eastern broadcasting than it does its fear that the region's media are not overwhelmingly pro-US. The BBG's current strategic plan's motto - Marrying The Mission To The Market - clearly expresses Washington's post-Cold War neoliberalism. But sometimes US foreign policy gets absurdly entangled in the contradictions produced by its own supply-side ideas of how to spread democracy. Early this month, Mr Pattiz trumpeted Al-Hurra's contribution to professionalising and privatising broadcast news culture throughout the Middle East, which 'is not an environment that is steeped in the same traditions of journalism and objective news analysis that we are familiar with - broadcasters in the region are, for the most part, government owned, and reflect a particular point of view that can be destructive to opinion about the United States'. SOPHISTICATED VIEWERS MR PATTIZ'S glib presentation of Washington's cross-border mass-media interventions as free-market anti- statism - as the fruits not of war but of globalisation - recalled not only modernisation theory's ethnocentricity but also that of the civilising mission Washington invoked to justify its initial imperial interventions a century ago. If history is any indicator, it is unlikely Al-Hurra's costs, in dollars as well as goodwill, will be worth its expense. Al-Hurra is no more likely to inculcate pro-US sentiment than Reagan-era Radio and (later) TV Marti has brought regime change to Cuba, or Panorama Panamericano persuaded Latin Americans that the Alliance for Progress could achieve modernisation in the 1960s. A 1965 USIA public opinion study of Panorama Panamericano's reception in San Salvador, for example, noted that local watchers considered the programme 'biased political propaganda', and that 'the sophisticated viewer recognises it as a partly disguised attempt to promote the Alliance for Progress'. The survey concluded that Panorama Panamericano was essentially ineffective, failing to change anyone's mind about US foreign policy. Regular viewers already held pro-US opinions and even among this group, only one of the four programmes studied 'showed a desirable pattern of audience reaction'. The Bush administration's decision to respond to its current crisis by granting separate interviews to Al-Hurra and Al-Arabiya, demonstrated its recognition that its message required a regionally indigenous, non-US-sponsored broadcaster. Al-Arabiya's inclusion underlines that the best public diplomacy would be not to impose officially sponsored US television on the Middle East. As the history of Cold War US foreign policy too often demonstrates, non-democracy in the name of democracy not only compromised principles but was counter-effective, especially in regions where public opinion is sensitive to past forms of international exploitation. Audience-demanded, regionally endemic television - that inevitably criticises Washington - is more in the interests of US security and Middle Eastern democracy than an external effort to engineer public sentiment, one that might well become a costly source of the very resentments the Bush administration wisely seeks to assuage. The writer is assistant professor of history at Yale University. He is working on a book about US foreign policy and Latin American television in the 1960s. Rights: YaleGlobal Online, |