THE REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE
US Propaganda at Home and Abroad since 9/11
Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor
Abstract / Events since 11 September 2001 have brought to light debates about the revival of
public diplomacy and the role of propaganda in domestic and global communications. This article
analyzes American strategies to manipulate information and to ‘manage’ the media against the
backdrop of the ongoing war on terrorism and of the conflict in Iraq. It explores the problematic
tension between democratic ideals and principles toward openness alongside government and
military needs of operational security and to secure public support in a ‘war’ that has been declared
on global terrorism. This ongoing tension requires a genuine movement toward more open media
and advocacy on the part of global citizens, including the strengthening of independent and noncorporate
media, in order to challenge prevailing media that are subject to government and military
influence. In a democracy, when things go wrong at home, it becomes much more difficult to
project a positive image abroad. The impact of these trends in undermining the messages of public
diplomacy overseas helps to explain both the success of US propaganda at home and its failure
abroad.
Keywords / censorship / democracy / Great Britain / propaganda / public diplomacy / September
11 / United States
Framing a ‘Global War on Terror’
The so-called ‘lone dissenter’, Representative Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) was the only
member of the US Congress to vote against the following resolution passed on 14
September 2001:
That the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those
nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided
the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or
persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States
by such nations, organizations or persons.
The vote was 98–0 in the Senate, 420–1 in the House. Representative Lee’s rationale
to vote against this legislation was based on the words of the Very Reverend Nathan
Baxter, then Dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, who earlier the
same day had led the nation in a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, and
The International Communication Gazette
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DOI: 10.1177/1748048506068718
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who warned that ‘we must not become the evil we deplore’ (PBS Online, 2001).
Where were the other voices to protect the historic ‘checks and balances’ function
of the three branches of the US government? They were, in fact, silent. Congresswoman
Lee would later tell reporters that there were many in Congress who secretly
encouraged her but who themselves could not imagine challenging the Bush
administration or do anything other than issue the executive branch of the government
with a blank check to use ‘all means necessary’ to punish the perpetrators of
9/11. Such was the depth of shock at this terrorist ‘propaganda of the deed’ and
the start of a process whereby the US began, perhaps unwittingly, to play into the
hands of their adversaries.
The dominance of censorship and propaganda is a triumph of authoritarian
over democratic values. During times of international crisis like the Cold War or now
in the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’, authoritarian values of secrecy, information
control and silencing dissent would appear to take precedence over democracy, the
First Amendment and a free press. The general trend since 9/11, especially in the
US, has been away from openness and toward increasing government secrecy
coupled with what can seem a rise in contempt among inner circle policy-makers
for a public’s right to know that may override national and homeland security
concerns. Every official pronouncement is now framed within the psyche of a nation
‘at war’ – epitomized by the renaming of Newark airport to Liberty International
Airport to the commercial marketing of a hot sauce with the phrase ‘burn, bin
Laden, burn!!’ – a war in which ‘you are either with us or against us’ and in which
‘there is no neutral ground’.
During any war, we hear many charges of propaganda being produced by the
warring parties. In most people’s eyes, propaganda equates to misinformation or
disinformation. These are much misunderstood words and they are frequently used
erroneously. Nonetheless, during the 20th century, democracies at war have tended
toward what was described during the Second World War as a ‘Strategy of Truth’
(Taylor, 1999: 208–48). This does not, of course, mean that the whole truth was
told. What it does mean is that democratic governments have tended to wage war
in a manner that mainly reflects the way they do business in peacetime, namely by
paying due respect to such characteristics of democratic practice as accountability,
transparency, protection of minorities, the accommodation of dissenting views and
so on. The freedoms that are suspended in wartime tend to relate to matters of
national or operational security, although it is too often forgotten that these are
anyway restricted in times of peace and that war merely brings these issues into a
much sharper focus. But the democratic propaganda model is also a way of establishing
the moral high ground, of demonstrating that democracy is a better way of
doing politics, and of continuing politics by other means, because democracies
rarely – if ever – wage war against other democracies. Democratic enemies are
usually non-democracies – a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime that does not
conform to international laws or norms. Hence, the ‘enemy’ conducts propaganda,
whereas democracies ‘tell the truth’, or at least as much of the truth as can be told
to achieve victory while preserving those fundamental democratic values so cherished
in normal times.
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In 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom threatened to throw this rule-book away and
to establish new guidelines for democracies waging war in the 21st century. The
issues of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), of Saddam Hussein’s connection to
the events of September 11, the ‘Saving Private Jessica’ affair, the selling of the
invasion of Iraq as a ‘liberation’ of the Iraqi people from Saddam’s regime – all these
themes proved to be highly controversial in the justification for war not only among
those four democracies who formed a ‘coalition of the willing’ to actually fight the
Saddam regime,1 but also within those democracies who were regarded as
traditional allies of the US but who now refused to join them in combat or even to
provide one final UN resolution authorizing a resort to war. Outside of the US, it
was arguably the most controversial war of recent history and, for Britain, probably
the most divisive conflict since the 1956 Suez crisis. The Blair government stood
accused of being Mr Bush’s poodle, of joining the US in a neocolonial war for oil,
an unjust and illegal imperialist venture that made connections between 9/11 and
Iraq when none existed, and of criminally assisting in the unfinished family business
of the American president.
In the US, polls revealed that around 70 percent of Americans believed that
Saddam was connected to the events of 9/11 and that popular support for the war
– and the president – was overwhelmingly in favor (Kull, 2003). In Britain, by contrast,
support rose from a mere 46 percent before the ‘support our boys’ factor kicked in
once fighting began on 20 March 2003, but even then it rose to only around 59
percent – far lower than the previous levels of between 70 and 80 percent enjoyed
by most post-Second World War warring British governments. In Spain and Italy,
whose governments supported the war despite overwhelming popular opposition,
the political leadership was taking an enormous gamble – as Mr Aznar was to
discover when he was unceremoniously rejected in the 2004 election that was to
take place in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid terrorist attacks known as
‘3/11’. France and Germany, the most outspoken in their opposition, were dismissed
by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as being ‘Old Europe’ (US Department of
Defense, 2003). Long forgotten was Le Monde’s declaration on 12 September 2001
that ‘we are all Americans now’ (Colombani, 2001) as unprecedented levels of antiAmericanism
rose across the globe and world opinion polarized in a manner certainly
not expected of Mr Bush when he declared that ‘you are either with us or against
us’ in the war against terrorism (Pew Research Center for the People and Press, 2003).
It was that ‘war’ – the one declared against an abstract concept such as ‘terror’
– which was to muddle the entire issue in the war against Iraq. Outside of the US,
people struggled to make a connection between the two. But within the US, the
issue was clearer, and the media and public alike harbored few doubts about Iraq
being the second ‘battle’ in the war against terrorism, after the first in Afghanistan.
This perceptual divide is perhaps the most significant aspect of the entire issue
within the field of international communications. Psychologically, many American
people perceive themselves to be ‘at war’ whereas very few others share the same
perception. Europeans, who are historically more familiar with terrorist attacks,
struggle to define the ‘war’ on terror as anything but an ‘American war on terror’
or even to see the conflict as meriting the description of a ‘war’ in the first place.
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 391
The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were the first strikes on
continental America since the British razed Washington to the ground in 1812. The
insecurity that this new attack generated prompted an isolationist-inclined Bush Jr
administration to declare a new doctrine that marked a fundamental change in US
foreign policy. This so-called Bush Doctrine had three essential strands – to hunt
down terrorists wherever they are, including in those rogue states now dubbed an
‘axis of evil’, to wage pre-emptive war to prevent further strikes or to prevent
weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands, and the aggressive
promotion of democracy, US-style (Bush, 2002). Despite NATO’s historic invocation
of Article V of its Charter on 12 September, the fear was that the US would pursue
these goals unilaterally without recourse to its traditional allies or the United
Nations.2 The problem was that the first two doctrinal strands jeopardized, and
perhaps even contradicted, the third.
Broadcasting Freedom: Al Hurrah Television for Iraq
When modern nations go to war, propaganda is a normal characteristic of their
battle on the ‘information’ front, a fourth arm alongside military, naval and air
campaigns. This was evident both in the war in Afghanistan begun a month after
9/11 and with Iraq. In the mid-1980s, the US Special Operations Command specially
designed a propaganda and psychological warfare aircraft called Commando Solo
that was capable of overriding domestic media broadcasts (radio and television) and
substituting outside content of any kind, true or false. In Afghanistan, it was used
solely as a radio platform as the Taliban had banned the domestic use of television.
In April 2003, Commando Solo was used to rebroadcast US media nightly newscasts
featuring Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings into Iraq in order to demonstrate
to the newly liberated Iraqi people what free media broadcasts look like. On 14
February 2004, the US government sent out a broadcast signal version of a Valentine’s
Day greeting card to win Arab hearts and minds. Meanwhile, back in Washington,
senior spokespersons talked of ‘regime change’ as a legitimate casus belli
and began to address messages to the Iraqi people via press conferences normally
reserved for dealing with the assembled reporters. In other words, every means was
taken to address global public opinion in general, and Arab opinion in particular,
and in the process the traditional lines between Public Affairs and Psychological
Operations became extremely blurred.
Just in case the media chose not to carry the messages that the Iraqi people
would soon be free of their dictator, it was also felt necessary to adopt a direct
government-to-people international broadcasting service. Radio Sawa (‘Together’)
and Al Hurrah Television (‘The Free One’) came about as a free press mandate to
challenge what the US administration and the US Broadcasting Board of Governors
(which oversees US official international broadcasting) perceive as the hate media
in the Arab region. In particular, Radio Sawa and Al Hurrah attempted to offer a US
response to the barrage of anti-US and anti-Israel stories and sensationalized
imagery coming from the more popular networks of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.
Radio Sawa attempted to attract younger Arab audiences by a cocktail of regional
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and western pop music. President Bush said that Al Hurrah would help combat ‘the
hateful propaganda that fills the airwaves in the Muslim world and tell people the
truth about the values and policies of the United States’. It did so from a very safe
distance. Al Hurrah is based not in the Middle East, but in northern Virginia, USA.
While the Bush administration hoped that Islamic eyeballs would be glued to the
US-declared truthful alternative, so far no one is fully embracing the ‘free one’
version, despite financing of US$62 million in congressional funding for the first
year alone. Although the station’s output was to be news-based, the traditional lines
between Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs were also becoming blurred.
In a MSNBC online review of some of the global media reaction to Al Hurrah,
early Arab newspaper editorials were universally contemptuous of the new broadcast
alternative, with the not unexpected negative reaction of ‘it’s all American
propaganda, anyway’. The Cairo Times said that many Egyptians remain ‘guarded’
in their reaction and were suspicious of the new station’s propagandistic potential
to shape news from a pro-US, pro-Israeli governmental perspective. The most prestigious
Arab-language newspaper, Al Ahram, said: ‘It is difficult to understand how
the US, with its advanced research centers and clever minds, explains away Arab
hatred as a product of a demagogic media and not due to its biased policies and
propensity to abuse Arab interests.’ Arab News, the Middle East’s leading English
daily, reported a ‘cool reception’ to Al Hurrah, which some viewers saw as ‘short
on credibility and long on arrogance’. The former minister of information in Kuwait,
Dr Saad Al Ajmi, reported a mixed review. In a special to the Gulf News, he said
that:
There is most certainly a vacuum for it [Al Hurrah] to fill. Before Al Hurrah, America had no
satellite television voice in the Arab world . . . Al Hurrah is playing catch up, and it remains to
be seen if it will be successful.
As we discuss later, this was largely the US government’s own fault. As official
public diplomacy initiatives diminished in the 1990s, the field was left to commercialization
in the true spirit of Cold War ‘victory’ over Communism. The Cable News
Network (CNN) did dominate the Arab airwaves in the early 1990s but this was
during the previous war in the Gulf and before Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya came
along from the mid-1990s onwards to challenge this English-language global media
station that was anyway accessible only to English-speaking elites in the region.
What remains to be seen is if those who initially condemned the network will find
curiosity getting the better of them and sneak a peek, if nothing else, to see if Al
Hurrah offers anything new and different in both content and production value.
Against a backdrop of rising anti-Americanism and an unfinished roadmap to
peace in the Middle East, it is however extremely doubtful that many hearts and
minds will be won until one aspect of American behavior changes – namely US
foreign policy. But another element is the US domestic media acting as a lapdog
rather than a watchdog. The US lacks the credibility it needs to project itself successfully
to the Middle East. Just calling a network free doesn’t make it so, especially
one tied so closely to the US government – and in this regard conceptual mistakes
were made right from the start since President Bush was the first guest interviewed
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 393
on Al Hurrah. Al Quds Al Arabi, a newspaper generally critical of the US, said that
the Bush interview ‘brought to mind official channels broadcast by regimes mired
in dictatorship, just like those of the 1960s and beginning of the 70s’.
The greatest credibility hurdle to overcome seems to be in the naming of the
station itself. To many viewers, if Al Hurrah represents ‘the free ones’ then that
makes ‘them’ the unfree ones. This magic bullet theory of communication assumes
that the sender’s desire for more free speech and more accurate information about
itself in a region coincides with the receiver’s needs. But many critics of Al Hurrah
maintain that the US still ‘just doesn’t get it’ about what the Arab audience’s true
needs are. One magazine writer, Amy Moufai, told an NBC News producer in Cairo
that she hadn’t watched the new US network, but was very surprised they would
choose a name like that which highlights the fact they don’t know what they are
doing in the Middle East. ‘It reeks of the whole notion of a white man’s bread: “Let
us teach you our free ways.”’ It is this failure to look at oneself through the eyes
of others that is at the heart of the American propaganda problem, especially if the
others are also reading the American media as one of many sources of information
to reinforce their viewpoints (Snow, 2004a).
Western Public Diplomacy after the End of the Cold War
In time, historians of the future will most likely attribute one of the root causes of
9/11 as being the short-sighted downgrading of western public diplomacy after the
end of the Cold War. With that earlier global ideological struggle declared ‘won’
after the fall of the Soviet Union and of the Berlin Wall, western public diplomacy
went into severe decline. The Clinton administrations in particular downgraded its
significance, culminating in 1999 with the absorption of the United States Information
Agency into the State Department. The USIA had been created in 1953 as
the principal coordinator of what many termed ‘international information activities’
including the conduct of student exchange schemes, international broadcasting and
the work of US cultural attaches. Its principles were based on the ‘Strategy of Truth’
and its ideological momentum was driven by the promotion of the ‘Four Freedoms’
and, together with the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, it
helped to disseminate those ideals to an audience in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe who clearly wanted – and needed – them. However, by 1999, USIA was a
thoroughly demoralized body and its chief broadcasting arm, the Voice of America,
was broadcasting a mere seven hours per day in Arabic.
There were voices arguing that these trends were potentially disastrous for the
western image, especially in the developing world. By abrogating itself from selfexplanation
and self-justification through its state-run international information
agencies, a perception or information vacuum was being created that was being
filled by two elements, neither of which was particularly beneficial to the world’s
surviving superpower. The first of these was home-grown: the rise of multinational
corporate advertising led to charges that the US was attempting to ‘McDominate’
the world through ‘coca-colonialism’, to spread western products – and the values
that came to be associated with them – through advertising at the expense of
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indigenous cultural development. In this respect, CNN, which came to the global
fore during the Gulf War of 1991, appeared to exemplify an American attempt to
dominate what then Vice-President Al Gore described as the ‘global information
infrastructure’. Although CNN employees proclaimed loudly their independence from
the US government, its replication of pro-US government themes during the 1991
Gulf War merely served to confirm the impression of a ‘military–media–industrial
complex’ at work to the detriment of others. Some of these themes were taken up
by the ‘anti-globalization’ movement in the 1990s and were often a thin veil for
anti-Americanism.
The second element was the massive amount of information, disinformation
and misinformation, which dissenting anti-western voices were now able to input
into the global info-sphere via the world wide web (invented in 1989 as the accessible
front-page of the internet) and subsequently by new regional media players,
the most famous of which was Al Jazeera, founded in 1995 and quickly dubbed
‘the Arab CNN’. This was an unwelcome label for the Al Jazeera correspondents as
most of them had been trained in the public service broadcasting tradition by their
former employer, the BBC. This provides a foretaste of the trouble ahead for Al
Jazeera in US eyes. For the public service tradition maintains that if you cover one
side of an argument you must balance it providing differing points of view. When
bin Laden identified Al Jazeera as his preferred station for exclusives of his taped
messages, the station did balance these with statements from Washington and elsewhere
but these went unnoticed by a US administration that saw only ‘enemy
propaganda’ and lies being disseminated by a station that was beyond its control
or influence.
Although Al Jazeera only came to be noticed by Americans after 9/11, it was
symbolic of significant changes that were taking place in the Middle Eastern media
landscape since the 1991 Gulf War. The most important of these was the likely
inability of western media organizations to dominate that landscape as they once
had through syndication, domination of news agency sources and so on. The alarm
bells sounded in the head of Joseph Nye in the mid-1990s, when he called for the
increased use of ‘soft power’ by the US. He defined this as the means by which a
nation projects itself in an attractive manner, where its values and principles are
subsequently desired by others because they are perceived to be universal. However,
there is a tendency in the US to assume that because of the ‘triumph’ of free-market
liberal capitalism in the Cold War, anything call sell if it is marketed properly. That
is why Charlotte Beers was hired to oversee US public diplomacy after 9/11. She
was recruited from Madison Avenue with a brief to ‘brand America’. She resigned
after two years perhaps because she finally realized that her job was impossible if
the policies are disliked. Ideally, policy and presentation should go hand in hand,
but if one gets ahead of the other, you are headed for trouble. In the Middle East
in particular, resentment against American policies had been festering for some
time. A clue that things were turning ugly was evident in the aftermath of Operation
Desert Storm, when Saddam Hussein was being celebrated as a hero in some
quarters because he had taken on the West – and survived. Then came the
attempted assassination of President George Bush Sr while on a trip to Saudi Arabia.
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 395
While the West basked in the glow of ‘victory’ in the Cold War and in the liberation
of Kuwait, the resentment that was brewing even saw the first attempt to blow
up the World Trade Center in 1993. Then came the African embassy bombings, the
attack on the USS Cole and Operation Desert Fox, all of which should have alerted
Washington that the Arab and Muslim world was far from happy with the continued
presence of western troops in the Holy Land of Mecca, despite the efforts to help
the people of Somalia or the Bosnian Muslims or even the Kosovar Albanians
through so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’. And by 2001, in the American
media, coverage of international news was also in terminal decline. So neither ‘side’
was getting a balanced view of events and, worse still, media analysis of complex
events like foreign policy issues was becoming a rare commodity.
Censorship and Propaganda in US after September 11
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible.
In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
(Lippmann, 1941: 43)
The father of modern American journalism lays out two essential tools in modern
media collusion with the state: censorship and propaganda. Censorship ends the
free flow of information so essential for democracy and makes dissent less likely.
Propaganda can inject false, misleading or slanted information into the media in
order to influence the behavior of populations at home and abroad. Censorship and
propaganda exist in the news media and come in many flavors – using unnamed
sources in national security stories; using the same elite-level sources repeatedly;
‘killing’ a story before it comes to light; and encouraging self-censorship on the part
of working reporters. Although they will rarely admit to it, news organizations are
often willing colluders with governments and militaries in efforts to censor because
major media owners are members of the political elite themselves and therefore
share similar goals and outcomes. Making profit would appear to rank higher than
telling the truth in the minds of some media owners and many of their employees.
There is nothing so sacred about having a media system driven by advertising and
the bottom line, but in the US the conventional wisdom is that profit-centered
media are as American as apple pie, the Fourth of July and the Founding Fathers.
The events of 11 September 2001 have simply intensified this reality, but they also
help to explain why the question ‘why do they hate us so much?’ had to be asked
in the first place.
A veteran reporter, Peter Arnett, who had covered the 1991 Gulf War for CNN
and received a Pulitzer Prize while covering the war in Vietnam for the Associated
Press, was fired in late March 2003 for granting an interview to Iraqi TV. In his interview,
he said:
Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. That is
why now America is reappraising the battlefield, delaying the war, maybe a week, and rewriting
the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance now they are
trying to write another war plan.
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Arnett was at first backed by his network, NBC, which issued a prepared statement,
reading:
Peter Arnett and his crew have risked their lives to bring the American people up-to-date,
straightforward information on what is happening in and around Baghdad. Arnett’s impromptu
interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy and was similar to other interviews
he has done with media outlets from around the world. His remarks were analytical in
nature and were not intended to be anything more.
However, the controversy did not die down and within days NBC announced
that it was axing Arnett:
It was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state controlled Iraqi TV – especially at
a time of war – and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions
in that interview. Therefore, Peter Arnett will no longer be reporting for NBC News and
MSNBC. (Kovacs, 2003)
Here we can see how policy and presentation have become so dysfunctional in
the global war on terror. The Bush administration wages a ‘war’ on terror as a war
for national survival. The often-repeated rational is that ‘we must defeat them over
there before they attack us here’. At home, accordingly, dissent is muffled out of
fear of appearing unpatriotic, and self-censorship in the media takes place from the
sacking of Arnett back to the television networks refusing the repeat the images of
falling people from the Twin Towers or even the rebroadcasting of the bin Laden
tapes first broadcast on Al Jazeera. When The New York Times apologizes for its
uncritical coverage of the 2003 Iraqi conflict, it is a pretty good clue that wartimelike
patriotism has won over once cherished democratic norms.
Abroad, American officials talk to foreigners as though they were ‘others’ who
merely want to become Americans and to buy into the American dream. It is as if
the traditional lines between the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ were still in place
despite the globalization of communications. As a result, it is little appreciated that
the reduction of democratic norms within the US contradicts the message of the
Bush doctrine about the promotion of democracy abroad. Merely insisting that
the US enjoys a free press does not necessarily make it so. Indeed, the support of
the US media for the war on terror and for the war in Iraq sends the reverse
message, even if the problem is that the US media choose to adopt this stance
rather than being directly forced to do so. Hence age-old accusations about the US
being hypocritical, arrogant and selective find fresh reaffirmation in the events of
Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib.
Global War on Terror: Information, Misinformation and
Disinformation
Beers’s appointment and the rejuvenated debate in the US about public diplomacy
was, of course, a direct response to the 9/11 attacks, to bewilderment about how
they occurred and a consequence of the question, ‘why do they hate us so much?’
The very fact that such a question needed to be asked suggests a serious failure in
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 397
media self-evaluation, or of governmental Public Affairs, or of both. But it is there
that the root failure of what was briefly after 9/11 being called perception management
lies, in the mistaken assumption that hard power should be left to speak for
itself.
And so now we have a ‘global war on terror’, a Bush Doctrine that encapsulates
notions of pre-emptive war to prevent future attacks on rogue states that form
an axis of evil that are to be subject to ‘regime change’ if they continue to harbor
terrorists or relish notions of supplying them at some future date with weapons of
mass destruction. The American dream has become a nightmare for others who wish
the wake-up call had been made far earlier in the morning or had not come at all.
Meanwhile, disruption to world travel, the rise of anti-Americanism and anti-western
sentiment, the creation of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq when none had most
likely existed before the regime change in Baghdad, with more than 2000 American
soldiers killed in Iraq and rising – have all played into the hands of those who resent
modernity, American mega-power and who accuse the West of hypocrisy, selectivity,
neocolonialism and Zionism. The reduction of public diplomacy initiatives in the
1990s due to short-sighted fiscal retrenchment was so dangerous that the disadvantages
of short-term economics in what will always be a long-term activity have
made the situation even more difficult, most likely much more expensive, and ultimately
harder to reclaim the position the West was in before it all happened.
The rise of anti-Americanism since 2001 is remarkable but is clearly directed
more at the Bush administration than the ‘American way of life’. Of course, fanatics
who fear modernity and who targeted that ultimate symbol of the triumph of freemarket
liberal capitalism in New York, were striking a blow against a way of life,
the export of which was deeply resented in certain parts of the Arab and Muslim
world. While the West denies that this is a ‘clash of civilizations’, there are many
adversaries that argue that the global war on terror is precisely that. They point to
the American president’s early use of the word ‘crusade’ or to the labeling of the
war as ‘Operation Infinite Justice’. They argue that between nine and 16 of the
hijackers are still alive, that 9/11 was a CIA–Mossad conspiracy to provide a pretext
for a war against Islam, that 4000 Jews failed to turn up for work at the World
Trade Center that day, that television images of celebrating Palestinians were taken
back in 1991 rather than on 11 September 2001 and a whole host of other
nonsense, which has taken root as ‘facts’ and which is perpetuated to a global
audience on the internet.
We need here to distinguish between misinformation, which could be defined
as wrong or incomplete information, and disinformation, which implies an attempt
deliberately to mislead. Usually associated with the Soviets in the Cold War era, we
now need to ask whether disinformation has become the deliberate policy of democratic
foreign policy as now conducted by the US since 9/11. In a war of national
survival – whether that war is real or imagined – all weapons are considered usable
(except perhaps nuclear weapons) by democracies. The focus of decision-making
shifts away from the diplomats and on to the military, and we know that the military
have long considered one particular weapon – deception – as a legitimate weapon
of war. One definition describes deception as:
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. . . those actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary military decision makers as to
friendly military capabilities, intentions, and operations, thereby causing the adversary to take
specific actions that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission. Military
deception can be employed during all phases of military operations. (Department of Defense,
1996)
The first hint of the deception weapon being deployed in the war on terror
came with the press outcry over the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) in the spring
of 2002. This was one part of a post-9/11 propaganda machine that was being
constructed, including Radio Sawa, Al Hurrah, the Office of Global Communications
in the White House and various other elements encapsulated in the military phrase
‘Information Operations’. After its existence was leaked to the press in March 2002,
Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the OSI had been created in the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks and, when pressed on its functions, he admitted that deceiving enemy
leaders through the international media was one of its functions. The American
media, which receive much of their foreign news through such channels, and were
protected constitutionally from such manipulation, were outraged – and, after a
huge outcry, the OSI was closed down (Gilmore, 2002).
In a sense, the Pentagon need not have bothered. The American domestic
media were fully ‘on message’ with the Bush administration in the war against
terrorism, including full support for the war against Iraq (Bennett, 2003). It reproduced
virtually uncritically the administration’s agenda, including any misinformation
about WMDs and the Al Qaeda–Iraq connection. But was the OSI an example
of the ‘at war’ mindset that was prepared to utilize disinformation or deception as
a weapon in a conflict that was seen by opponents as a ‘clash of civilizations’ and,
as such, as a war of ideas? The US administration is constitutionally forbidden from
conducting any form of psychological warfare against the American people. Despite
the rise of ‘spin’ that could be argued to be a way of getting around this – i.e. the
argument that it is ‘public relations’, not propaganda – and the semantic arguments
that this goes with, the globalized world has negated traditional boundaries
between the national and the international. In other words, in a global info-sphere,
information, misinformation and disinformation recognize no national boundaries,
especially as the principal purveyors of it – the global media – are now controlled
by a relatively small number of transnational multimedia corporations. These
organizations, like Rupert Murdoch’s News International, recognize that local needs
attract local audiences – compare Fox News TV coverage in the US to that of Sky
News in Britain during the Iraqi war – but they nonetheless utilize much of the same
material for their global outlets. Hence, any disinformation is likely to reach a local
or national global audience regardless of whether one foreign or international
audience was or was not the initial target. The American media understood this
when they raised such an outcry over the OSI.
One can only assume that the Pentagon understood this as well, which was
why they created the OSI – and why they disbanded it. They had been found out
in an aggressive strand to the global war on terror, although Mr Rumsfeld retained
the option of keeping deception in his arsenal. He subsequently admitted that he
would still practice it, and there is a hint that the work continued through what
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 399
was known as the Office of Special Plans (Cass, 2003). The target audience would
appear to have been global – including ‘enemy’ and friendly audiences – although
the latter are declining in number with every day that passes in the war on terror
(Shanker and Schmitt, 2002). It is not only that which excites suspicion, but also
because the war on terror is essentially a global struggle for hearts and minds, and
the media are the principal channels for winning the argument, any deception activities
are bound to be branded as disinformation. In order to avoid such charges, the
US government addresses global audiences directly through their public diplomacy
channels – the Voice of America and other new initiatives such as Radio Sawa and
Al Hurrah TV.
War First, Diplomacy, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power
Second
Mr Rumsfeld is also on record as stating that he does not know what ‘soft power’
means. Any American diplomat would tell him that Joseph Nye’s phrase is the means
by which a nation projects itself in an attractive manner, where its values and principles
are desired by others because they are perceived to be universal (Nye and
Owens, 1996). It is a lubricant for the smooth-running of day-to-day diplomacy.
However, when a nation goes to war, this public diplomacy tends to be pushed into
the background, and if one compares the budget for public diplomacy initiatives
like Radio Sawa or Al Hurrah to the Pentagon’s defense budget, it is minute. Yet all
experts are agreed that if the war on terror is to be won, due attention needs to
be paid to the global struggle for hearts and minds. After all, the president has
declared that ‘we are in this for the long haul’ and if the war on terror is to be won
it is not just a question of ‘smoking out’ terrorists wherever they hide but also of
re-establishing the image of the US as a ‘force for good’ in the world, especially
among younger audiences in the Arab and Muslim world. The tragedy of Iraq is
that, if there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11 before Operation Iraqi
Freedom, the war actually created one in the insurgencies and resistance that
followed it.
The Office of Special Plans was a highly secretive body and very little is known
about its activities before it was closed down at the end of 2003, its job presumably
done. Yet, as the Iraqi insurgency continues, there has been an invigorated
debate about public diplomacy that raises some hope for the advocates of ‘soft
power’ as being the tool – as distinct from a weapon – that will ultimately prevail
in the conflict – as distinct from war – against terrorism and the causes of terrorism.
A ‘war’ against terror is in fact a war without end. In the second Bush Jr
administration, senior officials started to refer to it as ‘The Long War’, recognizing
that it was a conflict that would take at least a generation to ‘win’. Yet the Bush
Doctrine is in fact the heart of the problem. It establishes US foreign policy as being
a national security strategy that reserves the right to wage pre-emptive war and
relegates diplomacy, public diplomacy and soft power to secondary positions. In any
war, the diplomats are forced to take a back seat to the warriors and, in the war
on terror, the State Department – including its public diplomacy initiatives – is forced
400 THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION GAZETTE VOL. 68 NOS 4
to take a back seat to the Department of Defense, including the Pentagon’s
approach to what is now termed ‘Strategic Communications’ (Taylor, 2002). Most
scholars of propaganda are agreed, however, that in a struggle for hearts and minds,
telling as much of the truth as can be told, warts and all, is the best way forward,
that public diplomacy is in the long term more beneficial than any short-term
approach to war propaganda.
Nothing Should be Taken for Granted: Freedom of Speech
or Strategic Communications?
Democratic propaganda has always relied upon credibility and creditable truths for
its effectiveness. That is what ‘won’ the Cold War – that other monumental struggle
for hearts and minds that took almost 50 years – two generations – for western
ideals and values to prevail. But whatever the enemy’s intentions and goals are this
time, the Cold War mindset that seems to be driving much of the counter-terrorism
offensive confuses the issue, not least because the destruction of western values
seems to be driving the motivation of the Islamic fanatics. The attack on the World
Trade Center was a symbolic attack on modernity and globalization, not an attack
on the US per se. The attack on the Pentagon was a strike against American megapower
in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both
created the Bush Doctrine. Neither resolved the heart of the problem – which is at
core the tactical issue of Palestine and the strategic issue of westernization.
Regardless of the wisdom of the policy response, democratic propaganda will
continue to lack credibility while the policy remains incredible. A Bush Doctrine that
belies centuries of norms in the international state system, and about which lawyers
continue to debate, cannot be sold by skillful public relations. Perhaps Charlotte
Beers came to recognize this when she resigned as Assistant Secretary of State for
Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy in March 2003 (CNN, 2003). When she was first
appointed, Secretary of State Colin Powell joked that her television commercials had
sold him Uncle Ben’s Rice. However, you cannot sell Uncle Sam’s policy to people
who have no money or even the water to boil any rice handed out on humanitarian
grounds3 (Brown, 2003).
The military–industrial–media complex is likely to remain a formidable force in
American politics and foreign policy. It is unlikely to weaken because power once
obtained does not voluntarily give up its domination. What should concern us is
when commercial and government interests that tend toward secrecy and perception
management over traditional democratic ideals of freedom of speech and free
press end up on the same team. We need to recall the words of President Eisenhower:
‘We should take nothing for granted.’
Three journalism events illustrate the point. The first concerns the firing of a
married couple employed as cargo staff for a US military contractor. The couple
violated the Pentagon prohibition of photographing returning war dead by snapping
a few photos as both were assisting in loading dead American soldiers at Kuwait
International Airport for transport home. The employer, Maytag Aircraft Corp., fired
them immediately after the photos were published on the front-page of the Seattle
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 401
Times. The photo depicted 20 US-flag draped coffins being secured for transport
to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. This followed a Freedom of Information Act
request from an internet entrepreneurial man of 34, who received over 300 images
from the Pentagon that he later posted on his website, Memoryhole.com. The
Pentagon announced that it would no longer release any additional war dead
pictures to protect the privacy of the families concerned, to which the White House
concurred.
A second event concerned the censoring of a popular comic strip, Doonesbury,
after Gary Trudeau dared to show one of his original characters in the comic strip,
B.D., missing a leg as a result of being sent to Iraq by his creator. One Colorado
paper wrote:
The Journal Advocate has chosen not to publish this week’s Doonesbury in the paper because
of the graphic, violent battlefield depictions of Iraq in this week’s instalment. The Doonesbury
comic strip for this week is available to our subscribers at the front counter, or by fax, mail or
e-mail, if requested. Call 522-1990. We will resume printing Doonesbury in the paper when
the content is deemed suitable for publication in the Journal-Advocate.
Finally, there is the case of US Marine Corps reservist in Iraq, Lance Corporal
Ted Boudreaux, whose photo of himself and two Iraqi children smiling widely shows
one child holding up a sign that reads: ‘Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad th(en) knocked
up my sister!’ In early April 2004, the photo that had been circling all over the
internet reached the inbox of Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, DC. Assuming the photo was real,
Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, issued an immediate press release that said:
‘If the United States Army is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people,
this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal.’ The CAIR release was picked up and
reprinted in a number of global online newspapers, including Paknews.com, with
no questioning of whether or not the photo may have been altered. A Salon
magazine article said that in an age of Photoshop, we must always question the
authenticity of any picture circulating the internet. Farhad Manjoo (2004) writes:
There was a time when photographs were synonymous with truth – when you could be sure
that what you saw in a picture actually occurred. In today’s Photoshop world, all that has
changed. Pictures are endlessly pliable. Photographs (and even videos) are now merely as good
as words – approximations of reality at best, subtle (or outright) distortions of truth at worst.
Is that Jane Fonda next to John Kerry at an antiwar rally? No, it isn’t; if you thought so, you’re
a fool for trusting your own eyes. Some photographers welcome the new scepticism toward
images; it’s good that people are learning not to automatically believe what they see, they
say. But many fear that we’re losing an important foothold on reality. Without trustworthy
photographs, how will we ever know what in our world is real?
The US military conducted its own internal investigation and Ted Boudreaux,
who returned from Iraq in September 2003, denies the authenticity of the photo.
Other versions of the photo have now popped up all over the internet with cardboard
signs that read ‘We wanna see Jessica Simpson!’ or inject a more positive
message that says the soldier ‘saved’ the dad and ‘rescued’ the sister. No one really
knows what the truth is, but in an age when we allow our own narrative pictures
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in our heads to determine the facts for us, the truth is almost irrelevant to the
damage that has already been done. CAIR, for its own part, has no more reason to
deny the authenticity of such a photo than anyone else, but the negative version
certainly fits the prediction CAIR made before war with Iraq that such an invasion
would hurt the Muslim image in the world. This is something that the US and
Muslim world have in common, for certainly the US invasion of Iraq hurt the
American image in the world.
In the July/August 2003 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, managing
editor Brent Cunningham questioned whether the American tradition of objectivity
in news (promoting fairness and balance) has turned US journalists into passive
recipients of news, particularly from official sources like government and corporation
elites. One case cited is the October 2001 memo from then CNN chair, Walter
Isaacson, while the war in Afghanistan was under way. Isaacson sent a memo to all
CNN foreign correspondents telling them to seek ‘balance’ in all their reports of
Afghan casualties by reminding their audience that such hardship or death came in
response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Cunningham reports in his article
that an intern called newspaper editors during the war in Iraq to see whether letters
to the editor were running for or against the war and was told by the editor of The
Tennessean that although letters were 70 percent against the war, the editor chose
to run more pro-war letters so they wouldn’t be accused of being biased by some
of their readers.
Objectivity, or its pursuit, persists in the US, because it separates American journalism
from the chaotic partisan journalism of some European allies. Cunningham
warns, however, that pursuing objectivity
. . . can trip us up on the way to ‘truth’. Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you’re on deadline
and all you have is ‘both sides of the story’, that’s often good enough. It’s not that such stories
laying out the parameters of the debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our
obsession with, as The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward puts it, ‘the latest’, we fail to push
the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false.
(Cunningham, 2003)
More troubling, Cunningham notes that objectivity ‘exacerbates our tendency
to rely on official sources’. Striking a balance, fundamental to a principle of objectivity,
often means getting the ‘he said’ and the ‘she said’ side of the equation. This
often leads to phenomenal media dependence on or collusion with the official story.
The Tyndall Report by media analyst Andrew Tyndall analyzed 414 stories on Iraq
from the Major Three (ABC, CBS and NBC) between September 2002 and February
2003 and found that all but 34 stories originated from three government agencies:
the White House, Pentagon and State Department. Why such dependence? Mostly
it is a question of time. The non-stop news cycle in major media and the new media
threat from the internet and Shout TV on cable has left reporters with less time to
dig deeper into stories. This encourages more reliance on official sources of information
that can deliver ‘the goods’ quickly and efficiently.
When the US and the world were debating a war with Iraq in the fall of 2002,
not one official in the Bush administration had much interest in discussing the aftermath
of a war. More important was to mount a full-court press for a pre-emptive
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 403
war against an evil cancer. The details of the aftermath would be worked out later,
but the public and press attention was to push ABS (Anything But Saddam). The
consequence of the ‘he said’ debate was that no ‘she said’ counterbalance debate
on the aftermath of war took place, with few exceptions. According to the Tyndall
Report, of 574 stories about Iraq on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news aired
between Bush’s address to the United Nations on 12 September 2002 and 7 March
2003, just 12 stories dealt with the aftermath of the war with Iraq. As Cunningham
(2003) asks, ‘If something important is being ignored, doesn’t the press have
an obligation to force our elected officials to address it?’ Not if that press is of the
same mindset and ideology of those with whom it confers for information, and not
if the ignored story is going to upend an otherwise good relationship between
reporter and source. The New York Times carried a headline on 25 November 2002
that read, ‘CBS Staying Silent in Debate About Women Joining Augusta’, a reference
to the network’s coverage of the Masters Golf Championship at Augusta
National Country Club, which has a policy of excluding women from playing golf
there. There was, as Cunningham noted, never a headline that read ‘Bush Still Mum
on Aftermath’. Was the aftermath of war in a foreign country any less important
or newsworthy than a domestic disturbance on the golf links in Georgia?
Conclusion
Media omission, like media collusion, is illustrative of a sameness in the American
newsroom where there lacks diversity not only in ethnic, racial and gender
categories, but perhaps more important, a lack of diversity in upbringing and
outlook. You won’t get the working-class Irish coming through the door for an interview
as often as the Ivy League-educated pup journalist with upper-class sensibilities.
This creates a bias born of class and socioeconomic heritage. Couple this with
a media bias toward conflict, the herd mentality and event-driven coverage, and
you’ve got the makings of a reinforced passivity in public media consumption. The
liberal bias charge is overstated according to Columbia University scholar James
Carey, who says that ‘there is a bit of a reformer in anyone who enters journalism.
And reformers are always going to make conservatives uncomfortable to an extent
because conservatives, by and large, want to preserve the status quo’ (Carey, 1988).
So we must ask ourselves as we often do, ‘What is there to be done?’ A few
modest proposals for liberating alternatives in media follow. First, we would
reinforce the first proposal from Cunningham (2003) for rethinking objectivity in
American journalism: ‘Journalists (and journalism) must acknowledge, humbly and
publicly, that what we do is far more subjective and far less detached than the aura
of objectivity implies – and the public wants to believe.’ Second, we must recognize
and confront the myths we live by. One myth is of a supposed adversarial
relationship between government and the media. This is a myth that is convenient
for both communities and is sustained for mutual benefit. Another common myth
is that overt censorship in news organizations does not exist. It does, and has historical
precedent, the result of benefits that reporters receive in their career advancement,
but also benefits that the government receives in return for media complicity
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in government efforts to mislead the public through domestic propaganda (e.g.
Saddam’s WMDs). We must acknowledge the enormous reliance in corporate media
on spin and official versions of the truth. The US government relies on a form of
censorship known as ‘censorship at source’, those unnamed official sources of the
news that we often see referenced in our newspaper front-pages. This keeps both
journalists and the public in the dark. Finally, the trend is toward further consolidation
of the media and a less open and democratic government or media. The
24-hour news cycle requires constant feeding, which advertising and publicity
prepackaged sources of news are only happy to nourish. In the federal government,
the largest public relations division is inside the Pentagon, where government public
relations specialists provide Monday through Friday feeds to the national media.
Embedded reporters didn’t just accompany the military to the Middle East, but
they also sat regularly for briefings from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Defense Spokesperson Torie Clarke and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.
In the global media environment today, the best journalist is increasingly the dutiful
journalist, who understands that symbiotic relationship between official channels of
information sources and the news story product. Where are the independent journalists
like George Seldes, who would have gladly been kicked out of his first Washington
press briefing in exchange for the neighborhood goings on back home
(Snow, 2004b)?
What this media reality means for the rest of us is that media activism and a
sustained media reform movement must become a larger part of our being citizens
in the world. Given what we know now about media collusion with the centers of
power, we have no choice but to create our own independent media while we
confront, cajole and analyze the military–industrial–media complex that dominates
our mental landscape.
As for the impact of all this on America’s image abroad, Donald Rumsfeld
conceded in March 2006 that the closure of the USIA may have been a mistake:
It wasn’t perfect, but it had libraries around the world, made movies, had various seminars
and opportunities for people to learn more about the United States. I don’t know what the
21st century version of that is, but we need it badly and we haven’t got it.4
What an admission, almost five years after 9/11 – a period of time longer than
US involvement in the Second World War. Several wartime propaganda initiatives –
such as Hi magazine for Arab youth or the Office of Global Communications – have
come and gone the same way as the Office of Strategic Influence and the Office of
Special Plans. Washington struggles to reinvigorate public diplomacy initiatives
within the broader recognition that a coordinated strategic communications
campaign is long overdue – not least to counter the negative impact caused by false
stories in the US media about, for example, the Koran being flushed down a toilet
in Guantanamo Bay. People died in a riot in Afghanistan over that mistake. But
merely reinventing Cold War-era public diplomacy initiatives will not do the job. The
internet was not around during the Cold War and the false Koran toilet flushing
story is now a ‘fact’ on that information front. Nor will any official soft power
messages about the attractiveness of the American way of life and of doing things
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 405
strike up a desire or a need to emulate American democracy while US foreign policy
remains dominated by the Bush Doctrine, or while US soldiers abuse their hard
power, or even while the US media remain so compliant.
One suspects a Cold War philosophy behind waging a global hearts and minds
campaign remains a key problem, namely that you can ‘Talk the Walk’ rather than
‘Walk the Talk’. That in fact has more in common with the authoritarian approach
to propaganda, encapsulated in Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ phrase,
‘The Big Lie’. That philosophy says that if you repeat something often enough,
whether it is true or not, people will eventually believe it. But, in today’s global
communications environment, there are simply too many voices, and too many
outlets for those voices, for this to work anymore, or at least not for long. Today,
truisms compete with ‘alternative truths’ and, to prevail, your truth has to be more
credible than their truth. That credibility ultimately depends on whether you do in
fact Walk the Talk. But if you don’t do it at home, how can your message abroad
command any credibility? Ultimately, therefore, the real challenge in the global
struggle for hearts and minds is that in the process of selling democracy, you do
not sell it out.
Notes
1. The US, Britain, Australia and Poland.
2. ‘An attack upon one is an attack upon all’.
3. The reference to Uncle Ben’s Rice is to a product marketed successfully in the US by Charlotte
Beers when she headed Madison Avenue advertising firms J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy &
Mather.
4. Remarks by Secretary Rumsfeld at the Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, 27 March 2006.
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04082003.html
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Snow, N. (2004a) ‘Al-Hurra-Al Who?: Haven’t Heard? We’re Free, They’re Not!’, O’Dwyer’s PR Daily
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9/11. New York: Seven Stories Press.
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Jan2003/t01232003_t0122sdfpc.html
Nancy Snow is associate professor in the College of Communications at California
State University, Fullerton, and adjunct professor in the Annenberg School
for Communication, University of Southern California. She also serves as senior
research fellow in the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. She is the author of The
Arrogance of American Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Propaganda, Inc.:
Selling America’s Culture to the World (Seven Stories Press, 2002); Information
War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9/11 (Seven
Stories Press, 2004). She is editor with Yahya Kamalipour of War, Media and
Propaganda: A Global Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
Address College of Communications, California State University, PO Box 6846,
Fullerton, CA, 92834-6846, USA. [email: nsnow@fullerton.edu]
Philip M. Taylor is Professor of International Communications at the University
of Leeds. He is the author of numerous works, including Munitions of the Mind:
A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (3rd edn,
Manchester University Press, 2003), British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century:
Selling Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Global Communications,
International Affairs and the Media since 1945 (Routledge, 1997).
Together with Nancy Snow, he is editing The Handbook of Public Diplomacy
due for publication by Routledge in 2008.
Address Institute of Communications Studies, Houldsworth Building, University
of Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. [email: p.m.taylor@leeds.ac.uk]
SNOW AND TAYLOR: REVIVAL OF THE PROPAGANDA STATE 407