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| When PR Becomes Propaganda | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 10 2010, 01:39 PM (174 Views) | |
| shure | Jun 10 2010, 01:39 PM Post #1 |
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When PR Becomes Propaganda Author: Matt Armstrong Posted: 06/08/2010 12:00:00 AM EDT http://www.defenceiq.com/article.cfm?externalid=2595&mac=DFIQ_OI_Featured_2010&utm_source=defenceiq.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DefOptIn&utm_content=6/9/10  Matt Armstrong is a strategist who addresses the landscape of US public diplomacy and strategic communication. He advises Congress, the Departments of State and Defense, consulting firms, think tanks, and other organizations in the US and abroad on the various aspects of global engagement. He is also the publisher of www.MountainRunner.us http://www.mountainrunner.us/ a leading blog on subjects related to this topic. Starting with a somewhat broad question, how has information dissemination and access changed in recent times, and what has been the effect on new communities and communicators? Well the effects on the modes of information dissemination have been quite substantial, and we have to remember as we talked about the ability for information to move around the world that people move around the world with incredible ease. So one of the things I would like to talk about is the concept of now media. You have merging of old and new into now media. So we can’t think in channels of print, TV or broadcasting, separated from say, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. They are all together and they combine and information jumps. It is also information that is persistent and information that is global, and it is immediate. And what happens as a result of that, to a point of new communities, is that you have new dynamic diasporas. Individuals can have slivers of identities, you can have challenges to the concepts of nationalism, allegiance, and there are new opportunities and threats created by this. So people, individuals and groups have reduced requirements to assimilate and as a fad, assimilate into some other group as they wish, and selectively. And in your opinion and experience, do governments need to “slow down” when it comes to this increasing encouragement of the militarisation of information, as some have argued? Where are the dangers in this sort of rapid evolution? Well I think there is definitely a challenge in the militarisation of information, certainly a danger. And the military is one of the first people to say that very thing. The issue is that governments need to get smarter. The military is taking over the informational engagement because they are the ones at the tip of the sphere, and they have come to realise the importance of perception. So within the United States we have the Defence Department which is still the predominant public diplomat. And what we need to have is the rest of the government stand up, which the US department has been constantly arguing for. The danger of rapid evolution is that we are in a dynamic environment. The adversaries which aren’t only Islamic extremists, but a whole range of folks, and may carry guns, or may not carry guns. They are agile, they experiment, they fail, they succeed. And yet we are slow to evolve in this, so we are caught flat footed. We, as in the United States, are often caught flat footed, and those lessons are applicable to most militaries if not all militaries around the world, and the same goes for governments. So the danger is really not for slowing down, but they need to speed up, and they need to do it more intelligently, and to balance it up, and remove these activities from the military sphere. Good point. So at what point does good PR become propaganda, and what barriers are thrown out by the use of public affairs, which by definition have to remain objective? Well PR can become propaganda, and public affairs can become propaganda. That is one of the common myths. Public affairs is really, as it is practiced in the US, and most elsewhere, is a set of tactics and procedures, methodologies of engagement. Public relations or public diplomacy, or information operations, or psychological operations have a different what we call TTPs: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. And objectivity is not excluded from those more active engagement methodologies, so the challenge here is really public affairs is reactive, that is a tendency, they tend to allow the media to be chosen for them. They are not pro-active, helping to shape the environment, and they are not proactive once a situation is starting to surface. They tend to wait, so what we have is this active engagement is tainted, because we assume it is nefarious and we don’t like to be influenced, in a democracy we are constantly influenced – in fact our leaders cannot get elected unless they are capable of influencing. We have this schizophrenia with information which is quite interesting, but the conflict isn’t with objectivity, it is understanding what is the purpose of information. Moving on from that, I would like to ask how much of a priority is the role of culture in conflict prevention and resolution today, and how in theory could an info ops strategy be able to leverage an understanding of this to achieve a successful result? Well the role of culture in conflict prevention and resolution is significant. The British council hosted a magnificent event recently in February, co-hosted with NATO and security defence agenda that discussed this very issue, and it was a quite brilliant discussion. It highlighted some basic fundamentals that I think are too often ignored, forgotten or neglected. And that is you can’t use information effectively if you don’t understand the culture in which you are trying to operate. So if you don’t know the symbols, the language, the vocabulary, the short hand of a particular culture – how you engage, why you engage, when you engage – you’re not going to be able to use information effectively. You are not going to be able to listen to the key words, phrases, timing, that our adversary, who are often imbedded or drawn from the target audience, knows and activates. So culture is absolutely essential. So to be successful, you have to understand your audience just as much as you have to understand your adversary, which Sun Tzu told us a long long time ago. Absolutely. Matt we have all been reading about the breakdown of the relationship that Google has with China, and the resulting fallout, which isn’t a million miles away from what you have been mentioning just now. How does this relate to the IO field, and what impact to do you see this particular event having on the global community, as a whole, in terms of say the ability or the inability to repress information? I think it is very interesting because we have China and we have other countries, Iran and North Korea who are developing their own systems to control what the west considers to be an uncontrollable resource, and that is the Internet, or the information that flows in the social media. The breakdown will be interesting. China is trying to control its people, Google is trying to provide free information to folks, and become a place to go to. I think what we see that is going to be more interesting in this realm of social media, is something that has come up in the recent Wikileaks video on the US military air strike that killed civilians, reporters and potentially insurgents, or at least armed individuals. I am not going to talk about the particular video itself. But the way that Wikileaks presented it was highly emotional and inflammatory in that it went way beyond seeking transparency in a valid mission. But what is very interesting is that there was a video posted in rebuttal to the Wikileaks video, and it highlighted the evidence within the Wikileaks content, and the content that Wikileaks edited out in the collateral murder video. And what is very interesting is that that video was suppressed by YouTube, because YouTube users had reported it as containing graphic violence, which of course the collateral murder video did as well. So what we have here is the ability of the community, whether it is a state like China, or a user community that can suppress information that is contrary to their views, and therefore be selective in what others can see. I think that is particularly interesting, in something that is too often overlooked. Something that is actively used by several communities on the internet, there is another individual that documented the repression of Facebook pages, where moderate and other comments were deemed inappropriate by those who were more conservative-leaning. It will certainly be interesting to see how the Wikileaks event plays out over the coming months. Just to wrap up, Matt, would you like to tell us about this think tank you are developing online, which I believe is called the Mountain Runner Institute, and how you see this affecting the IO community at large? That’s great, thank you. The Mountain Runner Institute is the new 501C3, which in the United States is the internal revenue code, saying that we are a non profit entity. The status is actually pending. The purpose of the institute is to provide focused analysis on public diplomacy strategic communication issues. We are a group of knowledgeable agents who come to the table as honest brokers. We are able to facilitate several conversations that others don’t want to or cannot, and the primary intention is to improve primarily US public diplomacy strategic communication with a very hard and focused look at the issues involved. |
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12:43 PM Jul 13