USC Center on Public Diplomacy

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Published: JUN 10, 2005 - 9:37AM PST

Worldcasting
CPD Fellow Alvin Snyder reports on issues in international broadcasting for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

DEEP THROAT’S PUBLIC DIPLOMACY CONNECTION
JUN 10, 2005 - 9:37AM PST
by Alvin Snyder

So now we are told that Mark Felt may not have been Deep Throat after all. The watchdog group Accuracy in Media (AIM) quotes a Watergate scandal expert, Joan Huff, a Montana State University history professor, as saying that this is all "an orchestrated publicity stunt on the part of the (Washington) Post" to publicize Bob Woodward's new book. Cliff Kincaid of AIM claims that former Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt also has his motives. Kincaid says the 91-year-old Felt was videotaped by news cameras at his home in California where he said he was enjoying the press attention and that he could "arrange to write a book or something, and collect all the money I can." So what does this have to do with international broadcasting and public diplomacy? Let me explain. Thirty-one years ago this month, around the time that Acting FBI Director Mark Felt was said to be meeting with fledging reporter Bob Woodward in dark garages in the wee hours of the morning to leak information about the Watergate investigation, I was tramping about the Middle East with the White House press office advance team setting up TV press coverage for President Nixon's upcoming trips. The President was about to practice public diplomacy with heads of state in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Israel, and to get some press about himself apart from the Watergate debacle. We visited each location in advance of the visits, then returned for the events themselves, together with the White House press corps covering the President. Thus, the White House press corps would be away from Washington and not covering Watergate for at least a couple of weeks, perhaps a motivating factor for White House planners. All the while, we are told, Mark Felt and Bob Woodward were communicating by re-positioning flower pots on balconies, marking up deliveries of the New York Times with code, and getting together in darkened parking garages. The trips abroad did not interrupt Watergate coverage however, as we know, and two months later President Nixon would announce his resignation. Now, if there had been such a thing as international satellite news channels back then, and audiences for them overseas, and the U.S. was beaming its coverage of the President's Middle East trip, and reporting what was happening in the Watergate investigation back home, what then? What do we expect from the audiences who watch government-funded satellite news channels? I've not seen any measure of effectiveness as to whether the channels are getting into anyone's heart or mind. Yet almost daily we learn of another government leader abroad who is going to spend tens of millions of dollars to get into the international satellite news channel business, to set his record straight with audiences of other countries. Here comes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who blames Washington for Latin America's economic problems, and is starting his own regional satellite TV news channel called Telsur (Television of the South). Within a few weeks he is expected to have…... FULL TEXT