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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.
CHANGING INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING IN THE OBAMA ERA?
NOV 6, 2008 - 4:44PM PDT
Posted by Monroe E. Price
All posts by this author
Can two late thinkers, a French philosopher and British media scholar, point the way to a new American public diplomacy— or at least an American international broadcasting strategy— for the Obama era? Let’s start with two unarguable points. The very election of Barack Obama shifts the world of public diplomacy and automatically alters the dynamic of U.S. messaging abroad. As Timothy Garton Ash put it in the Guardian, “Obama is himself a weapon of mass attraction.” Second, as commission after commission and report after report found this decade, without addressing underlying foreign policy initiatives, attention to the form and technique of the message was a somewhat losing operation. Now, policies and public diplomacy goals may be brought into greater harmony. A new international broadcasting strategy should be sufficiently ambitious to take into account sea changes in the media and cultural environment. What are dimensions of a rethinking? In the mid 1990s, Jaques Derrida delivered a series of lectures later compiled into a short book called Of Hospitality. Derrida didn’t specifically address international broadcasting (far from it), but the discussion can be adapted to reconsider the art form. International broadcasting could move from primarily a means of projecting perceptions of the U.S. and reflecting (even if indirectly) U.S. policies to one which would be a platform for cooperation, mediation, and reception— a mode of being informed as well as informing. The focus— as I am wildly rereading Derrida— would be on creating an international broadcasting environment built on receiving and hearing as well as sending. It would be a platform that would demonstrate more pervasively the idea of recognizing messages from all sides. Public diplomacy and international broadcasting might be constructed on principles of deeper reciprocity as well as rearticulated targeting. There could be even more collaboration among international broadcasters to achieve this goal. I want to make clear that this refiguring would go far beyond the recent preoccupation with “listening,” as outlined in many public diplomacy proclamations, or the frequent efforts at increasing interactivity such as in “My BBC”. This refiguring would affect not only the international broadcaster— increasing its sensitivity to the views of its international audience— but affecting the American audience as well. Actually, Roger Silverstone, the chair of Media@LSE came very close to this connection in his last book, Media and Morality. He described, longingly, a Mediapolis that would serve as a site in which “communication is multiple and multiply inflected… open to the circulation of images and narratives.” For Silverstone, unless the media (in some form) did the work of bringing home a wide variety of opinions, virtually unedited and unfiltered (especially those of the “other” ), then the society would not be well informed. The opportunity of the media to make its rich contribution to its own society would be lost. What, actually, would a different international broadcasting and public diplomacy be like? One point would be to rethink what would become the mainstays of U.S. international broadcasting; country or region-specific services (i.e. Radio Farda…... FULL TEXT
Read Comments (1) | Add Your Own
 Read Comments:
E.J. Smith on November 10, 2008 @ 1:07 pm:
Wonderful idea! We really do need to hear
directly what the 'Other' has to say.
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