MC 404 Political Communication

Candidate Number: 82167

Question 4. Is public diplomacy just propaganda?

Date of submission: 08/01/2017

Word count: 3266

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Is public diplomacy just propaganda?

Introduction

Propaganda is the promotion of an ideology ‘spread through the mass media

to get the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in
some action’ (Black, 2001: 125). From this definition, the utilisation of propaganda
should be value-neutral as all social institutions deploy propaganda one way or
another to achieve their objectives; it could simply be a communicative tool as part of
a country’s public diplomacy strategy that aims to ‘influence the attitudes and opinions
of other peoples and governments … to exercise influence on their foreign policy
decisions’ (Gullion, 1966 as cited in Edward R. Murrow Centre of Public Diplomacy,
n.d.). However, throughout several major conflicts, propaganda gained its negative
connotation when it became heavily associated with lies and hate speech in WWII and
recently in the U.S propaganda campaign post 9/11. Scholars have argued that public
diplomacy is propaganda due to their similar function of information dissemination
(Cull, 2008; Jowett & O’Donell, 2012). After all, the end goal is to get a foreign public
to share one’s opinion. This essay will argue the contrary, due to the contested nature
of both terms, it would be too reductionist to conclude that multi-layered public
diplomacy practices can only be propaganda. Furthermore, public diplomacy, while
can be propagandistic, must be investigated on a case-by-case basis. The line
between public diplomacy and propaganda can be more or less blurry depending on
the context in which they are practiced, and how they are practiced. The essay aims
to highlight the nuances that characterise public diplomacy practices by discussing the
use of public diplomacy by the US under the Bush administration and the Obama
administration, showing that there are clear differences between public diplomacy and
propaganda, and that a committed public diplomacy strategy is everything but
propaganda.

Public Diplomacy vs. Propaganda

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (2001), in a Washington Post article,

characterised the Bush administration’s strategy to counter terrorists: ‘Call it public

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diplomacy, or public affairs, or psychological warfare, or - if you really want to be blunt
- propaganda’. Holbrooke was not the first one to equate public diplomacy and
propaganda. Scholars have often used them interchangeably since both entail
strategies aimed to influence foreign public opinion. Hart (2013) argues that all US
government’s attempts to sell American ideas and foreign policy use propaganda
techniques as part of their public diplomacy. This confusion is due to the fact that, as
Gilboa (2008) discusses, there lacks a clear framework of public diplomacy - its
definition and implementation. Without such distinctions, governments may mix the
two together, risking to damage their relations with other country and their credibility
in the international arena. Propaganda campaigns in WWI and II contained biased or
intentionally misleading information to sway the public opinion to support a
government’s war objectives or even to influence foreign publics to increase pressure
on their own government. Propaganda is always one-sided, unidirectional. It
misrepresents truth, relies on ‘arousal of emotions’ and only provides a snip of reality
that is in favour of the particular goal a government is pursuing. When we think of
propaganda, one thinks of the extensive propaganda campaigns Nazi Germany
deployed to demonise marginalised groups and justify their authoritarian rule.
Propaganda in this context is used to ‘modify or crystallise an attitude’ toward a person,
or a group, or towards a policy (Lasswell, 1927: 630). The main aim of a propagandist
is to ‘multiply all the suggestions favourable to the attitudes which he wishes to
produce and strengthen, and to restrict all suggestions which are unfavourable to
them’ (Lasswell, 1927: 630). One distinctive feature of propaganda is the use of
censorship. Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘Without some form of censorship, propaganda
in the strictest sense of the word is impossible […] Access to the real environment
must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks is wise
or desirable’ (1922: 43). Similarly, Snyder (2013: xviii) defines propaganda as a state
monopoly over political communications. The combined evil of propaganda and
censorship is evident in the way the Bush administration handled their external
communications leading up to and during the Iraq War, as well as in their collusion
with the media, which will be further discussed in the next section.

Public diplomacy, on the other hand, ‘involves building long-term relationships

that create an enabling environment for government policies’ (Nye, 2004: 101) through
effective and honest communication with foreign publics. Nye added, public diplomacy

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is a two-way process, it’s not only talking but also listening, it’s engaging in dialogues
to understand the other side as well as to communicate one’s side. Scholars have
questioned whether the practice of public can truly distance itself from propaganda
since the goal is still ultimately to disseminate a country’s foreign policy objectives and
therefore a ‘balanced’ projection of views is not always possible (Alexander 1987;
Mirchandani, 2014). However, as Nye (2004) has argued, public diplomacy is different
than propaganda because while the former nurtures relationships through trust and
understanding, the latter lacks credibility and is only useful to achieve short-term goals,
if not completely counterproductive. A successful public diplomacy strategy is one that
1) explains a country’s foreign policy to foreign publics, 2) portray a fair and balanced
image of that country’s society, culture, and institutions, 3) promotes mutual
understanding with foreign public, and (4) helps inform the country’s policymakers
about foreign publics’ attitudes (Rugh, 2006). Furthermore, Nye ties public diplomacy
with the concept of soft power; effective public diplomacy can increase a country’s
ability to ‘affect others to obtain the outcomes it wants through attraction rather than
coercion or payment’ (2004:1). In other words, through the exercise of public
diplomacy, a country can get other countries to share or at least understand its values,
which makes policy coordination possible or persuasion easier. For example, shared
values, language, trade relations, and common objectives are often cited as the basis
of the UK-US special relationship. Roselle, Miskimmon, and O’Loughlin (2017) argue
that this strategy of nation branding is especially crucial for a country to project its
influence and facilitate cooperation over time. Furthermore, since the longevity of a
brand depends on the positive reception of its target audience, the ability to match
one’s actions with one’s words is very important. The lack of consistency between its
public diplomacy and its foreign policy is the reason why the US is still suffering from
a ‘diplomatic deficit’ despite its efforts to repair national image under the Obama
administration.

US Public Diplomacy - fraught with tension

In this section, the essay will attempt to highlight the differences between
propaganda and public diplomacy by comparing the ways in which the Bush
administration and the Obama worked with relevant institutions to improve America’s

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image abroad. The collusion between the state and the media under the Bush
administration led to what Nancy Snow and Philip Taylor (2006) termed the ‘revival of
the propaganda state’ in which information was tightly controlled, manipulation tactics,
and emotional appeals were deployed to pursue unilateral objectives. The aftermath
of such propaganda efforts was an unprecedented rise in anti-American sentiment
worldwide and a dramatic decrease in the US’s credibility. Under the Obama
administration, however, the government took steps to restore the national image by
reforming their public diplomacy structure into one that takes into account a range of
nonstate actors involved in the relationship-building process, fostering mutual trust and
understanding, signalling the administration’s adoption of new public diplomacy
practices. Additionally, through the example of the Obama administration, the essay
aims to show that public diplomacy, if it is to establish long-term relationships that are
built on trust, requires serious commitments from a government, sometimes including
foreign policy change.

The Bush administration

‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe
it’ - Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany

Indeed, throughout the course of the War on Terror, the Bush administration
didn’t fail to emphasise again and again the need to wage a war in order to defeat an
undefined enemy and to protect America’s most treasured values - democracy and
freedom - through its claims about weapons of mass destruction, and ’the axis of evil’
and ‘you’re either with us, or against us’ rhetoric. The media and the government
formed a tight military industrial complex propaganda system to sustain public and
foreign public support for war efforts (Kellner, 2004; Kumar, 2006), deliberating
disseminating unverified claims and suppressing contradictory voices. The goal was
to justify a pre-emptive war in Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, and stir
enough anti-terrorism sentiment to cloud public’s judgement of what was going on.
Additionally, because the administration was convinced that the 9/11 attacks were
because the terrorists ‘hate freedom’, the Radio Free Afghanistan Bill was passed to
launch Bush’s version of ‘Campaign of Truth’. However, this was proved to be ill-
thought-out; Radio Sawa (Together) and Al Hurrah Television (The Free One) created

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with the purpose of countering what the administration perceived as anti-US stories
from popular networks in the region like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya (Snow and Taylor,
2007: 392) weren’t very well-received nor did they serve their purpose. Even though
Bush hoped that these media channels would tell people in the Muslim world the truth
about the values and policies of the US, it was soon clear that it took more than just
western pop music and carefully curated news to change the hearts and minds of the
Middle East. The lack of understanding of the receiving ends of the message was at
the core of American propaganda problem. The US was already suffering a crisis of
legitimacy in the Middle East, the colonisation of Western values harboured
resentment in local communities, and Western media were already perceived as
biased and pro-US since the Gulf War in 1991 (Snow and Taylor, 2007: 395), as well
as the invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The core issue was not that
they were not aware of American values, they simply perceived them as imperialistic
and illegitimate. Bin Laden captured this sentiment perfectly: ‘The call to wage war
against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against
the Islamic nation, sending […] troops to the land of the Holy Mosques over and above
its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and
tyrannical regime that is in control.’ (as cited in Sullivan, 2001). Without addressing the
US’s foreign policy first and foremost, any propaganda nor public diplomacy attempt
would not change the Middle East’s perception of America.

The administration once again missed the mark to sell American policy abroad
with Charlotte Beers’ ‘Shared Values’ campaign videos. Beers - an ‘advertising guru’
- was hired as chief of public diplomacy to ‘sell a product’ and to ‘rebrand American
policy’ (Plaisance, 2005). The videos featured five Muslim-Americans from different
social standings speaking of the high degree of social tolerance in the US to dispel
myths about persecution and discrimination of American Muslims. These videos were
set to air in several Muslim countries during the Ramadan. Unfortunately, once again,
the administration demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of their audience,
thinking that showing happy smiling Muslims in America would deal with the issues of
the US foreign policy in the Middle East - the concerns about its use of military
violence, cultural influence and economic projection. Beers failed because she didn’t
understand the context of anti-Americanism, ‘selling Uncle Sam’s policy is not the
same as selling Uncle Ben’s Rice’ (Snow and Taylor, 2007: 401). As Snow suggests,

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in order to really improve the US image overseas, serious foreign policy readjustment
is needed, and people-to-people public diplomacy should be utilised. Moreover, the
videos were propagandistic in the sense that they were trying to promote a lie that
American Muslims didn’t face persecution and discrimination after 9/11 (Plaisance,
2005: 190). In reality, more than 700 uncharged Muslims were incarcerated, the US
Immigration and Naturalisation Service passed a new policy that requires Middle
Easterners to register with the government, all of which reflected the discriminatory
practices against American Muslim population that the government were adopting.
The US’s public diplomacy approach was counterproductive because of several
reasons: it was propagandistic, it was not based on an understanding of its audience,
and it was ‘patronising’, ‘condescending’, if not outright ‘racist’ (Zaharna, 2009: 3). It
was argued that by solely targeting these predominantly Muslim countries exclusively,
the US reinforced the idea that only Muslim nations were breeding ground for
terrorists, when in fact, many, if not most, named terrorists are European nationals
(Snow, 2003: 104). More importantly, the US must practice what they preach first, they
could not continue advocating for democracy and freedom when they were causing
mass destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq while turning a blind eye to human rights
violations in Guantanamo Bay. Like Cull has argued: ‘The most potent voice for an
international actor is not what it says but what it does” (2008: 36). Under the Bush
administration, public diplomacy was indeed just propaganda.

The Obama Administration

When Barack Obama came to power in 2009, he inherited a massive budgetary

deficit after the 2008 financial crisis, and an all-time-low credibility perception of the
US worldwide. Under his presidency, the US’s public diplomacy strategy focused on
projecting America’s soft power and retrenching its military presence. It was developed
to mirror Nye’s conception of an effective public diplomacy in three dimensions: daily
communication, strategic communication, and development of lasting relationships
through scholarships, exchanges, and projects. This section aims to show that public
diplomacy, when done right, is much more than propaganda, and requires concerted
efforts from every level of government and even the ordinary American citizens. Most
importantly, while the Obama administration understood the necessity to match public

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diplomacy messages with genuine foreign policy changes, they didn’t live up to their
promises, which further hampers American’s public diplomacy efforts. By refusing to
use their hard power when required, they ironically undermined their attempts at
projecting their soft power (Krieg, 2017). Public diplomacy, as a result, proves to be
extremely difficult to be executed effectively due to the necessity for policy
collaboration. Thus, public diplomacy can be argued to be the antithesis of
propaganda.

It was very clear from the outset that Obama was determined to redefine the
relationship between the US and the Middle East. In his famous Cairo speech, he said
‘I have come here to seek a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the
world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect’ (Obama, 2009). Public
diplomacy under the Obama administration was to promote American values through
internships and exchange programmes, as well as increasing private business
partnerships (Zhaohui, 2015). It aimed to demonstrate the US’s goodwill through the
‘diplomacy of deed’ - US humanitarian assistance, health, education, and economic
development programmes (Nakamura & Weed, 2009: 33). Like Nye (2004) and Ross
(2002) have advocated, the Department of States facilitated many educational
exchange programmes through which international students have the opportunities to
come study in the US and vice versa e.g. Fulbright. It also developed public diplomacy
programs and projects to support women’s rights like TechWoman in which women in
STEM from the Middle East and Africa participate in a mentorship programme in
leading US technology companies (US DOS, 2013). In total, it was reported that the
DOS and NGOs funded 225 citizen diplomacy programs that cover fields like political
reform, economic reform, educational reform and women’s rights (US DOS, 2013).
Through such projects, mutual understanding between citizens from both sides can
hopefully be achieved, American values and culture can be disseminated and fully
understood.

Previous US public diplomatic failures were due to the lack of understanding of

their audiences, the assumption that reception is passive and straightforward. Edward
Murrow - the director of the US Information Agency under the Kennedy administration
once noted ‘The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet,
which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.’ Public Affairs
Officers were deployed to reach out to local communities, work with people who may
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be ‘vulnerable to radicalisation, providing an alternative message of hope and
opportunity’ (Brown and Hensman, 2016). Additionally, US’s engagement
programmes were established to counter ISIS narrative in the Muslim world.
Campaigns and workshops were run with local authorities in order to work with young
people across the region in an attempt to resist ISIS recruiting (Brown and Hensman,
2016). Judging from the aforementioned efforts, it seems that the US government was
putting serious thought into reconstructing their public diplomacy. Their programmes
were designed to facilitate meaningful exchanges of ideas and promote cultural
understanding and appreciation of US society and its institutions, all of which are clear
examples of successful public diplomatic practices. However, there’s a final, most
critical dimension of public diplomacy that was overlooked - US foreign policy. The
inconsistencies between its words and actions rendered the whole approach
counterproductive and hypocritical.

Despite having promised that the US was partner and friend of the Muslim world
who could rely on each other, President Obama failed to commit to the region during
the Syrian Civil War, which not only resulted in continuing atrocities committed by the
Assad regime, but also created opportunities for Iran and Russia to act with impunity
there, furthering the already socio-political disintegrated region. Obama’s covert drone
war in Somalia, Libya and Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013 went against the
administration’s commitment to building peace. As Korenig (2017) puts it, ‘In Europe,
Asia, and the Middle East, Obama left behind a far more dangerous world than the
one inherited in 2009.’ The unfulfilled promises and the lack of commitment continued
to reduce credibility and the effectiveness of US public diplomacy efforts. The Pew
Global Indicators Database (2017) continue to show low U.S favourability in Middle
Eastern countries. Nonetheless, this is not to say that US public diplomacy efforts are
inappropriate; they did reflect the administration’s commitment to engaging with the
foreign publics, but they are just not enough. Had they listened more carefully, they
would have understood that the source of hostility against the US in the region mostly
stems from America’s contradictory foreign policy (Wallin, 2012; Zaharna, 2009; Snow,
2003). While it’s understandable that foreign policy changes are often controversial
and subject to structural limitations, the lesson here is that the US needs to stop
overpromising and under-delivering (Wallin, 2012: 27-28). To do so is even more

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detrimental to the US’s credibility than simply not promising at all. Public diplomacy,
therefore, requires careful thinking about policy objectives in the long run.

Conclusion

In conclusion, public diplomacy can be propaganda but it is not just

propaganda. As this essay has attempted to demonstrate, propaganda is one-sided
communication with the sole goal of getting your ideology across by all means,
including deceit and manipulation tactics. The messages in a propaganda campaign
tend to convey one specific story with incomplete and often inaccurate information, as
in the case of the Bush administration’s control and distortion of information.
Propaganda has no regard to its audiences and their socio-political context, as in the
case of Beers’s ‘Shared Values’ videos. On the other hand, effective public diplomacy
helps a country develop trust, build relationships, and resolve conflict through
meaningful dialogue with the foreign publics. It has to be genuine and truthful and aim
for mutual understanding and respect. Most importantly, public diplomacy can only
work when foreign policies are consistent with soft power initiatives (Nye, 2004).
Without such multilevel commitments, a country will only damage its credibility, making
it extremely difficult to rally support for future endeavours.

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