Sean Aday. The Real War Will Never Get on Television: An Analysis of Casualty Imagery in Television Coverage of the Iraq War. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 17, 2004. A team led by GW Professor and Public Diplomacy Institute board member Sean Aday analyzed 200 hours of television coverage from March 20 – April 9, 2003. The paper concludes the media presented an almost entirely bloodless war to viewers emphasizing “video game” aspects of military technology rather than human aspects of U.S. military power.
Cheryl Benard. Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies. Rand Corporation, 2003. In this 88-page study, Benard examines Islam’s internal and external struggle over values, identity, and place in the world. She distinguishes four groups — fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists, and secularists — and offers a strategy to encourage change compatible with greater democracy, modernity, and world order.
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, The Penguin Press, 2004, and “Seeds of Revolution,” The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2004. Buruma and Margalit examine the impact of Western ideas in revolts against imperialism and links between religious zealotry and modern ideology. They suggest fault lines in the struggle of ideas do not “coincide with national, ethnic, or religious borders,” but between those in all societies and religions who favor civil liberties and freedom of thought and those who do not.
Anthony H. Cordesman. Hostages, Murders, and Desecrated Corpses: Iraqi Political and Psychological Warfare, Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 11, 2004. In this brief paper (11 pages), Cordesman analyzes how factions in and out of Iraq are using asymmetric armed force, terrorism, psychological warfare, and global media platforms to achieve political goals.
Barry Fulton. Taking the Pulse of American Public Diplomacy in a Post-9/11 World, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 18, 2004. Public Diplomacy Institute Director Barry Fulton summarizes common themes in recent studies of public diplomacy and causes of anti-Americanism. He finds consensus that American public diplomacy lacks strategic direction, adequate resources, and proper coordination. The paper offers seven propositions for transforming the conduct of public diplomacy.
Barry Fulton. “Communications Researchers and Policy-Making,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48(1), 2004, pp. 151-154. In his review of Sandra Braman, ed., Communication Researchers and Policy-Making (MIT Press Sourcebooks, 2003), Fulton examines essays by academicians and policy analysts linked by Braman’s introduction and transitional chapters. He looks at how the U.S. government’s support for communications research during World War II led to its development as field of study, issues that have kept research and public policy communities apart in the decades since, the “Djerejian report’s” focus on a nexus between research and public policy, and the need to reestablish trust and collaboration between academe and government.
William P. Kiehl. “Speaking Out: The Weakest Link in our Foreign Policy Arsenal,” Foreign Service Journal, April 2004, pp. 15-17. Public Diplomacy Council Executive Director Bill Kiehl analyzes problems that have weakened public diplomacy and calls for “basic reform and restructuring of the public diplomacy function of the State Department.”
Samuel P. Huntington. “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” The National Interest, Spring, 2004, pp. 5-18. Huntington argues “the central distinction between the public and elites is not isolation versus internationalism but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.” Elite concerns increasingly include participating in the global economy, supporting trade and migration, building international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identification and cultures at home. He contends the public overall is concerned with physical security and sustaining “existing patterns of language, culture, association, and national identity.” Excerpt online. Go to Spring 2004 issue.
Samuel P. Huntington. “Letters,” Foreign Policy, May-June, 2004, pp. 4-13 and 84-91. In an extended exchange, Roberto Suro, Fouad Ajami, Minxin Pei, and others challenge Huntington’s “The Hispanic Challenge” (Foreign Policy, March-April, 2004). Huntington replies. The letters are not yet online. His article is posted at the website below.
Dirk Kinnane. “Winning Over the Muslim Mind,” The National Interest, Spring, 2004, pp. 93-99. Kinnane argues U.S. international broadcasting’s Radio Sawa and Al Hurra lack influence and credibility, and the “Djerejian report’s” public diplomacy recommendations are insufficient to address root political problems of powerlessness and humiliation in the Muslim world. The “only really effective approach,” he contends, is to “provide an international platform for those Muslims who seek to reconcile Islam and the modern world.” Kinnane cites the Congress of Cultural Freedom as precedent and makes a case for covert funding as “the cost of doing business.”
Susan Moeller. Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), March 9, 2004 and “Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Failure of the Media,” YaleGlobal, April 14, 2004. In her 101-page CISSM study, Moeller reviews U.S. media coverage of weapons of mass destruction in May 2003 (Iraq), October 2002 (Iraq and North Korea) and May 1998 (South Asia). She asserts that U.S. media (1) accept the political formulation of WMD as a single category of threat, (2) inaccurately associate mass destruction with terrorism, and (3) operate in ways that permit incumbent Presidents to dominate news coverage by setting the terms of public discussion. In her short YaleGlobal article, Moeller contends that U.S. media, caught in patriotic fervor, did not adequately cover the government’s claims before the war in Iraq.
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “A New Voice {Al Hurra},” April, 15, 2004. The NewHour’s Terrence Smith looks at the U.S. government’s Arabic language satellite television station. Interviews include Broadcasting Board of Governors members Ken Tomlinson and Norman Pattis, Al Hurra’s Mouafac Harb, and Ambassador Edward Djerejian. Available in text, streaming video, and streaming audio.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. “The Decline of America’s Soft Power: Why Washington Should Worry,” Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2004, pp. 16-20. Nye applies discusses his soft power concepts in the context of the struggle against Islamist terrorism, increased funds for public diplomacy, greater support from the White House, and development of short, medium, and long term public diplomacy strategies. Excerpt online.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 12, 2004. Nye discusses his recent book on Soft Power and related issues with Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of The New York Times. Transcript (15 pp.) available online.
Pippa Norris, Montague Kern, and Marion Just, eds. Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government, and the Public, Routledge, 2003. This collection of essays looks at theories and cases of media framing. Chapters by Doris Graber, Robin Brown, Brigitte Nacos, and others focus on perceptions of terrorism, how governments and dissident groups seek to manage the media, ways in which journalists construct news, and how citizens respond to news coverage of terrorist events.
Susan Raines. “Evaluating Cross-Cultural Exchanges for Peace Building: How Much Bang for the Buck?” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 17, 2003. Kennesaw State University Professor Raines summarizes attempts to evaluate exchanges and measure benefits to individuals and societies in such programs as Seeds of Peace, Global Children’s Organization, and Search for Common Ground. She pesents tentative findings from current exchange evaluation efforts.
Glenn Reynolds. “The Blogs of War: How the Internet is Reshaping Foreign Policy,” The National Interest, Spring, 2004, pp. 59-64. Reynolds, a University of Tennessee professor of law and Instapundit.com blogger, looks at ways the Internet is undermining the role of news organizations as gatekeepers and the role of free lance writers with laptops in the Iraq War.
Walter R. Roberts and Barry Fulton. “Rebuilding Public Diplomacy,” National Strategy Forum Review, Spring 2004. In this 3-page paper, Roberts and Fulton discuss challenges facing public diplomacy, lessons from history, and offer proposals for change.
Paul Starr. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, Basic Books, 2004. This sweeping history by Princeton sociologist Paul Starr shows how political choices have shaped modern communications as much as technology. Starr compares the American experience with sharply different patterns in Europe. In a narrative that ends in 1941, he demonstrates how communications structures in the United States have become a source of economic growth, cultural influence, and military advantage — and how the power of the media has challenged traditional views of the press in a democracy.
Gabriel Weimann. “www.terror.net: How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet,” United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 116, March 2004. USIP Senior Fellow Weimann examines eight ways that terrorists use the Internet “ranging from psychological warfare and propaganda to highly instrumental uses such as fundraising, recruitment, data mining, and coordination of actions.”
Alan Wolf. “Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland,” Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2004, pp. 120-125. In his lengthy review of Huntington’s new book, Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity, (Simon & Schuster, 2004), Wolf contends that Huntington in his study of the challenges of immigration has abandoned the “clear eyed realism” of earlier writings in favor of “moralistic passion” and a “nativist hysteria.”
Useful Tools and Research Projects
Newseum: Today’s Front Pages. An online version of the Newseum’s daily collection of front pages from more than 250 newspapers around the world. (Courtesy of Steve Chaplin)
John Brown is preparing a bibliographical essay on public diplomacy and an article on public diplomacy as carried out by countries other than the United States. John also puts out a daily public diplomacy press review, which is available on request. He was in the foreign service from 1981 to 2003 and served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. He has given courses on public diplomacy at Georgetown University and is the author of “The Purposes and Cross-Purposes of American Public Diplomacy.” He can be reached at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.
Pamela Smith has prepared a bibliography on public diplomacy, broadly defined, for her spring 2004 graduate course on public diplomacy at Georgetown University. Her bibliography draws on her own research, her examination of syllabi for courses taught by Public Diplomacy Council members, and other sources. Now on a two-year assignment at Georgetown, she previously served as U.S. Ambassador to Modlva, Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs in London, Press Attache in Jakarta, and Cultural Attache in Belgrade. She can be reached at phs5@georgetown.edu.