Transcript
MR. STEPHEN HESS: Last week you may recall that we did a program which was the three months after the bombing started in Afghanistan and our assessment of how things were going. Marvin, my co-host. I'm Steve Hess of the Brookings Institution. I co-host the program with Marvin Kalb, the Executive Director of the Washington Office of Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Last week Marvin was under the weather and at the last minute Bernard Kalb filled in. It was heroic. We all want to thank Bernie. I also want to tell you, Marvin, that I'm an only child. If I'm sick in the future, you're on your own.
(Laughter)
The report last week was that we were doing very well indeed on the battlefield, and this week we turned to the question of whether we are doing equally well in winning the war for public support around the world.
Today we have to figure out as a group, I hope, with our distinguished panel what the public diplomacy or propaganda is, what it should be, whether we have a strategy for it, and how we can effectively tell our story to the rest of the world. We have a unique panel to help us along.
We have Karen De Young, the Associate Editor of The Washington Post, who has been watching, observing, and writing about other nations' perceptions of America since she was assigned as the Latin American Bureau Chief in very dicey days in the late 1970s. She subsequently reported from Europe as the Bureau Chief in London. She was the Foreign Editor of the Post as well as the National Editor. So we're very happy to have Karen with us.
We have Joe Duffey who is one of the great public advocates of public diplomacy. He was the Director of the United States Information Agency from 1993 to '99. He has also been Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. Do you want all of his resume? It's pretty impressive. But he has also been the President of American University and the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts. We're happy to have Joe with us.
Tom Dine has a remarkable job and we're particularly grateful to him for being here because he lives in Prague where he is President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and this, many of us believe, is the great success story of public diplomacy for the role it played in telling democracy's story in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism.
And finally, a very important part of this program which makes it really quite different than some of past efforts. You recall typically we have a war and then after the war the journalists and the government officials have a conference, they write a report, the report is filed, some years later we have another war, perhaps they can still find the report but probably they can't.
What's been different about our program is that the Bush Administration has been sending the people who are most involved in the areas that we're here to talk about while things are going on. The issue in December we talked about was anthrax, we had the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Public Affairs with us on this program. Last week when the question was the war coverage in Afghanistan we had Torie Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Pentagon.
Today we have Chris Ross from the State Department. He is the Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, a long-time Ambassador to Syria, before that to Algeria, and has been in the news most recently, most interestingly, as the Arab-speaking voice on Al Jazeera when there have been tapes and America wants to make its response.
So this is our panel today. As we usually do Marvin Kalb, my co-host, will start the questioning.
MR. MARVIN KALB: Thank you Steve, very much. I'd like to start with a question that has to do with definition and that is what are we talking about? We talk about public diplomacy and we talk about propaganda. I have in front of me an article that Dick Holbrooke did for The Washington Post about two months ago and he begins it by saying "Call it public diplomacy, call it public affairs, psychological warfare, if you really want to be blunt, propaganda."
Ambassador Ross, is that about it? Is it simply propaganda? And if it is, that's fine. Just explain it to us.
MR. CHRISTOPHER ROSS: No, I don't think that's the case, and I hope I'll be somewhat more skillful in answering the question than I was in pouring myself some water. (Laughter)
I conceive of public diplomacy as being the public face of traditional diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy seeks to advance the interests of the United States through private exchanges with foreign governments. Public diplomacy seeks to support traditional diplomacy by addressing non-governmental audiences, in addition to governmental audiences, both mass and elite. It works very much in coordination with and in parallel to the traditional diplomatic effort.
When I heard the word propaganda I imagine a much more manipulative kind of process than I would like to think that public diplomacy is.
MR. KALB: Is propaganda as well providing lies, trying to put a bad thing in a good light? Trying to take something good, make it even better? Are you exaggerating? Are you distorting? I'm trying to get at the difference.
MR. ROSS: I think you've pointed out a good difference. Much propaganda contains lies and does not shy away from them. In public diplomacy we don't deliberately look to state things that are not true. We may couch them a certain way, but we deal with the truth.
MR. KALB: Joe Duffey, dealing with the truth all the time?
MR. JOE DUFFEY: You know propaganda is not that bad a word in French. We used to use it in the United States without the kind of connotations it now has. The Financial Times sometimes talks about "propaganda (what the U.S. calls public diplomacy)."
I think the issue now is credibility. I think lies, you can't get away with lies very much. They damage your credibility. The issue, maybe the sharpest way that I came to understand public diplomacy is it's an attempt to get over the heads or around the diplomats and official spokesmen of countries and sometimes around the press to speak directly to the public in other countries and to provide an interpretation, explanation of U.S. values and policies.
MR. KALB: How would you get around the press to talk to the public?
MR. DUFFEY: Well, sometimes if the press is providing a particular... We give Al Jazeera a very hard time because they ran the tapes. CNN would have run those tapes if they had them exclusively. Al Jazeera is a modern corporatized news network which is doing, in my mind, a pretty good job. The governments have been very unhappy with Al Jazeera in many places. So sometimes the press may distort the situation simply by their fascination or their interest in it. Isn't that a phenomena of the competitive sensationalist temptations that the press sometimes has?
MR. KALB: Tom Dine. If the difference between propaganda and public diplomacy as so far described anyway is one of nuance, do you regard yourself as being involved in propaganda, public diplomacy, or what?
MR. THOMAS A. DINE: It gets back to your first question about what is the definition. I think a much more expansive view that Ambassador Ross just articulated, and it's closer to Joe's, propaganda is information with a purpose. And in relationships with people you try to be persuasive, you try to have a truthful relationship.
In the case of a news gathering and news disseminating organization like ourselves, and I'm sure the Washington Post and any other credible organization, you try to gather facts, you try to understand the difference between important news and non-important news, and then disseminate with the belief that in a democracy, in a society of pluralistic ideas and situations, that you will be informing people of news and information so they can make decisions.
The negative view of propaganda is that it is a methodological way of either being in favor of something or against something. From a news and information point of view you're trying to fulfill the first responsibility of our freedom?the freedom of speech, freedom of press. That's how we conduct ourselves in putting together our programs every day.
MR. KALB: Karen, putting aside for a moment definition. As a reporter, as an editor you are observing pretty much the process. How do you think the United States is doing in the dissemination of truth, policy, subtlety to the rest of the world?
MS. KAREN DE YOUNG: I'm going to go to definition just really briefly because I think clearly the word propaganda in English has come to have a pejorative connotation, but in fact in terms of definition just deals with the dissemination of information to further one's purpose.
I think that where it is the same as public diplomacy is that this, it's in how you choose your information. What information you choose to make public. Obviously you choose to make public information that furthers your own aims, which is not the same as telling lies. And I don't think one would expect necessarily any Administration to do differently.
How have they been doing? I think that they've been doing very well in this country because I think people are very much disposed to agree with them. We have found that when you write things that don't necessarily agree with them or at least are seen as not agreeing with them, you get a whole lot of response very quickly.
I think they're not doing very well at all overseas. Not because they've been derelict somehow in putting out information, but just because people are not disposed to believe this particular brand of information and they're getting other information from other sources and when they balance it according to what their own beliefs are it doesn't necessarily measure up.
I also think that because the Administration to a large degree has chosen to present its public diplomacy or have the people who are working on its public diplomacy, with the exception of Ambassador Ross and some others, come from the political side of the Administration.
The person who is in charge of this for the White House is Karen Hughes. Karen Hughes is a very, very skillful person who is utterly and absolutely dedicated to the President and the furthering of the President's agenda and the President's interest and the President's image. Again, I'm not saying that's wrong, but I'm saying that's part of the problem to the extent they have a problem, and again I don't think they do have a problem domestically.
MR. KALB: But internationally, Ambassador Ross, how do you see at this point the major difficulties that you face in getting the position of the United States across?
MR. ROSS: It is not an easy task but it's somewhat different from what has been portrayed in the media since September 11th. If you recall since September 11th there has been a theme to the effect that the world hates us, or at least certain important segments of the world hate America, and that somehow public diplomacy must affect that hate and transform it into something else.
From my perspective, having worked overseas a number of years, I don't think that people hate America, with some exceptions. What you see overseas in most cases is a mixture of admiration and envy and a certain amount of dislike for the fact that we are the sole remaining super power. But that doesn't translate into the kinds of extreme actions that we saw on September 11th.
I think what people react to most abroad is concrete policies that they don't agree with. And that is the focus of their attention. As we try to address all of this, our first task is to make sure that our government's policies are understood for what they are and not for what other people are saying they are. So there's a process of explication here which is useful. It does not change many minds when people are truly not in sync with our policies. But beyond that there is a much longer term effort needed to put those policies in a context, a context of American values, and to do that by a number of long term programs that we can get into.
MR. KALB: Joe...
MR. DUFFEY: Chris is now talking about cultural diplomacy as well as public diplomacy, which is another part of this.
I think we all ought to have an enormous sympathy for the challenge that this effort has right now. John Gaddis at Yale said recently that since September 11th the United States has undergone the most significant revision of its foreign policy in more than a decade.
President Bush goes to the United Nations, to his great credit, and makes a statement about the legitimate objectives of the Palestinians. We'll never again not pay our dues to the UN simply because one Senator doesn't want us to. We've changed that. We're consulting a lot more. I don't hear anybody talking about the indispensable nation. We are approaching the world differently.
Now we've got to have a little time to show the credibility behind that, but this Administration and particularly Chris and his colleagues are trying to interpret that chastened understanding, and to the credit of the Administration, it's genuine changes that are being signaled and in effect. That's not an easy task.
MR. KALB: You're both playing the same horn at the moment.
Could you provide a single element of success, and maybe not...
MR. DUFFEY: Yes.
MR. KALB: Let's have it.
MR. DUFFEY: Actually...
MR. KALB: I mean in term