I've been thinking lately of the public-relations campaign that the Bush Administration began soon after the 9/11 attacks to convince people in Muslim countries how wonderful America was. They got commercial advertiser Charlotte Beers to head up the initial effort as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, . She was no slouch in the advertising world. She had been chairwoman of Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson.
She resigned her post last year. But before she left, she produced such efforts as the "Shared Values Initiative" (video ads about how nice things are for Muslims in America) and a series of "Mosques in America" posters. A research at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley characterized the ad campaign this way: "The premise of U.S. propaganda in the Middle East is that Muslims and Arabs are idiots -- simple-minded, feeble-minded idiots. ... Arabic newspapers crack jokes about these ads all the time." (One might wonder why an American ad exec might take that approach to a target audience.)
The same researcher pointed out that the basic problem in the Beers approach was that it didn't address the substantive policy issues that affect US relations to the Arab world, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Even if they send dancing monkeys, even if they send Britney Spears to live for five years in the Middle East, it's not going to change how people feel," he said.
In their book Weapons of Mass Deception (2003), Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber describe how Beers' campaign fell short in practice:
These activities ... did little to persuade most Muslims, who found the war in Afghanistan more distrubing than anything that handshakes or posters could addresss. The irony is that of all the military activities in which the United States has engaged during the last 50 years, the war in Afghanistan was certainly one of the easiest to defend on its merits. The terrorism of 9/11 had provoked the U.S. well beyond the point at which any nation capable of responding militarily would feel compelled to do so.
(Cont. in Part2)
No comments:
Post a Comment