[NYTr] A Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/rampton10182007.html

"Shared Values" Revisited

A Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda

By SHELDON RAMPTON

I received a request recently from a university professor who teaches a
course about media literacy. She was wondering if I could help her find
videos of the "Shared Values" television ads that the U.S. Department
of State produced to improve the image of the United States in Muslim
countries shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, so
she could show them to her students.

I was a bit surprised to realize that the ads are fairly hard to locate
online, but after some searching, we were able to find copies. To
ensure that they will remain available, I uploaded the videos to two
popular internet repositories: YouTube [2], where people can easily find
them and drop them into their own web pages; and the Internet Archive
[3], which should ensure that they survive for posterity.

Twenty or fifty years from now, scholars wishing to understanding the
relationship between the United States and the rest of the world will
certainly be interested in studying the "Shared Values" campaign. As my
professor friend wrote back after finding the videos, "The ads are a
great teaching tool about propaganda." Like most propaganda, they tell
us a great deal about how the propagandists see themselves as well as
how they want to be perceived by others.

"Shared Values" was part of a public relations campaign launched by
Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive who was
appointed by Colin Powell as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public
Diplomacy and asked to help "rebrand" the United States to improve its
image in Muslim countries.

In practice, the Shared Values campaign ran up against rising Muslim
anger following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. As we
have pointed out on this website on numerous occasions, the U.S. image
has plummeted internationally - especially among Muslims. Here is how
John Stauber and I analyzed Charlotte Beers and her rebranding effort
in our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception:

    Dubbed a "Muslim-as-Apple-Pie" campaign by the New York Times, the
"Shared Values" videos featured photogenic Muslim-Americans playing
with their children and going about their jobs. One TV commercial
showed Rawia Ismail, a Lebanese-born schoolteacher who now lives in
Toledo, Ohio. Her head covered with an Islamic scarf, Ismail was shown
with her smiling children in her all-American kitchen, at a school
softball game, and extolling American values as she taught her class.
"I didn't see any prejudice anywhere in my neighborhood after September
11," she said.

    The problem with these messages is not that they were necessarily
false. The problem is that, like the rest of Charlotte's web, "Shared
Values" avoided discussing the issues at the core of Muslim resentment
of the United States-the Palestinian/Israel conflict and the history of
U.S. intervention in the region. "We know that there's religious
freedom in America, and we like that. What we're angry about is the
arrogant behavior of the U.S. in the rest of the world," said Ahmad
Imron, an economics student in Indonesia after watching one of the
"Shared Values" TV ads. 

Viewed today, the Shared Values campaign, and even our critique of it,
looks rather quaint and naive. Since John and I wrote those words,
America's reputation has been further eroded by the ongoing violence in
Iraq and by photographs of America soldiers gleefully torturing
prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The idea that the United States is a tolerant
nation has been undermined by the behavior of the war's strongest
supporters, as pro-war columnists like Michelle Malkin and blogs like
Little Green Footballs regularly refer to Arabs and Muslims as "vermin"
in need of "sterilization," while campaigning for the "free speech" of
U.S. soldiers who compose humorous songs about killing Iraqis, or
rallying to the defense of a student after his arrest for stealing
stealing copies of the Koran and flushing them down toilets.


Does Propaganda Work?

After reviewing opinion polls that found steep declines in America's
public image in every Muslim country surveyed, John and I concluded in
Weapons of Mass Deception that the Shared Values campaign was an
"abject failure." Most observers at the time agreed. The TV ads were
controversial in the countries where they aired, and government-run
channels in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan flatly refused to run them at
all. Less than a month after the launch of "Shared Values," the State
Department abruptly suspended it. "Islamic opinion is influenced more
by what the U.S. does than by anything it can say," commented an
advertising executive in the Wall Street Journal. Charlotte Beers
resigned two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and comments at
O'Dwyer's, a leading public relations industry trade publication,
greeted her departure with cries of "good riddance" and dismissive
comments about her competence.

More recently, a couple of communications professors, Jami Fullerton
and Alice Kendrick, have argued that the Shared Values ads were more
effective than people realized. Fullerton and Kendrick reached their
conclusions by conducting a survey that involved showing the ads to a
test audience of university students in London and surveying their
reactions. They first announced their findings in 2004, prompting a
blistering critique from journalism professor Lawrence Pintak, who
pointed out that only six of the 105 students surveyed were even
Muslims.

Since Pintak wrote his critique, Fullerton and Kendrick have attempted
to bolster their research by conducting a second survey in London and
additional surveys in Singapore and Cairo. They have published their
findings in a book, titled Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of
the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative. However, much of
the substance of Pintak's criticism still applies. For one thing, all
of their surveys involved small samples of students at international
universities. (Can the reactions of English-speaking students at
American University in Cairo really predict how the rest of the Muslim
world will respond to the ads?) As one book review noted,

    The two London samples included 5.8% and 17% Muslims respectively,
and the Singapore sample 13% Muslims. Muslims were the largest group
(82%) in the Egyptian sample but the total number of participants in
that case was only 39, potentially compromising the validity of the
findings.

Beyond these methodological concerns, moreover, Pintak correctly
observed that "the whole issue of the effectiveness of the commercials
is actually beside the point." Whatever positive impression the ads
might have generated in people who viewed them was countered by the
generally negative public outcry throughout the Muslim world about the
very fact that they were being broadcast, and the Fullerton/Kendrick
survey had no way of measuring this factor. More importantly still, any
positive effects of the ads have been vastly outweighed by the negative
attitudes that the U.S. has created toward itself through its invasion
and occupation of Iraq.

Monologue About Dialogue

Regardless of whether the Shared Values ads were effective, they were
in any case dishonest. Each "Shared Values" video ended with a tag line
that said, "Presented by the Council of American Muslims for
Understanding ... and the American people." But although "the American
people" supposedly co-sponsored the ads, few Americans had ever heard
of the Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU). This is
because CAMU was actually a PR front group, created and funded by the
U.S. State Department.

Front groups are an example of a PR tactic known as the "third party
technique," in which the sponsor of a message seeks to put their words
in someone else's mouth. Usually this is done because the sponsor
thinks the message will seem more credible if someone else says it.
Here is how John and I described CAMU in Weapons of Mass Deception:

    In another effort to achieve "third party authenticity," a group
called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU)
launched its own web site, called OpenDialogue.com. "It will be
government-funded, but it's not government-founded. I'd like to say we
founded it," said the group's chairman, Malik Hasan, who nonetheless
admitted that the idea for CAMU began with the State Department.
Visitors to the website, whose declared mission was "bringing people
and cultures together through dialogue," were invited to send away for
a free copy of "Muslim Life in America," view the stories of Rawia
Ismail and the others profiled in the "Shared Values" TV commercials,
or to "tell us your story" by sending an e-mail.

The striking thing about the CAMU web site, however, is how little real
dialogue it enabled. This is, after all, the twenty-first century.
Internet newsgroups, web forums, email listservs and even web cams have
long ago perfected the technologies that enable real dialogue to occur
in real time between people throughout the world. The absence of
opportunities for genuine dialogue may explain why OpenDialogue.com has
been irrelevant to most people seeking information about U.S.-Muslim
relations. A Google search on April 8, 2003 found only 58 other web
pages that link to OpenDialogue, most of which were sites run by U.S.
embassies or other government agencies. For comparison's sake, there
were 2,200 links to IslamiCity.com, a site that discusses world affairs
from a Muslim point of view.

After the Shared Values campaign ended, CAMU's government funding dried
up, and the group quietly disappeared, as did its website. When I
visited OpenDialogue.com just now, I found a commercial spam site with
popup ads that crashed my web browser. You can still find a copy of the
original website, however, at the Internet Archive [4]. On its
"questions and answers" page, CAMU described itself as "a private,
non-profit, non-partisan and non-political organization."

This, of course, is deliberate deception. An organization created by
the U.S. State Department is certainly not "private," and it is only
"non-political" if we interpret that term in the narrow sense of "not
involved in electoral politics." (Malik Hasan, its chairman, is a
wealthy Republican activist who subsequently became a founding member
of "Muslims for Bush.")

One of the hallmarks of propaganda is that its practitioners are wholly
preoccupied with the question of whether their message "works" and are
indifferent to the question of whether their message is "true." At the
risk of sounding like a moralist and scold, I believe that honesty is
important in communications, even if dishonest messages sometimes
"produce the results we want." This, however, is a point that Fullerton
and Kendrick do not seem to have considered in their analysis.

Ultimately, though, I think propaganda fails even the "effectiveness"
test. Propaganda is the language through which power expresses itself.
By its very nature, it is incapable of sustaining the sort of dialogue
that creates genuine understanding between different cultures. If
Americans truly wish to be respected and appreciated by the rest of the
world, we have to find other ways of communicating.

[1] See Sourcewatch:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Shared_Values

[2] http://www.youtube.com/profile_video_blog?user=sheldonrampton

[3] http://www.archive.org/details/SharedValues

[4]http://web.archive.org/web/20030618060820/opendialogue.com/english/home.html

[Sheldon Rampton is the co-author, with John Stauber, "Weapons of Mass
Deception" and "The Best War Ever."]