By Brigitte L. Nacos
That President Barack Obama is sticking to his campaign promise of changing America’s foreign policy approach was obvious, when he granted his first formal White House interview to the Arab TV-network al-Arabiya and used the occasion as a platform to address the Arab and Muslim street. As Karen DeYoung reports in the Washington Post, the responses to the president’s outreach “have been largely positive.” But her assessment is not based on polls of or interviews with regular Arabs and Muslims but rather on the reactions of various government officials. While there is no doubt that leaders of governments and of non-governmental groups took notice of Obama’s promise for a new start in America’s relations with the Muslim and Arab world, one wonders how many members of general public in these countries watched the actual interview.
Unfortunately, by selecting the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya network rather than the Qatar-owned al-Jazeera, the White House selected a moderate medium with a rather modest viewership over a more Arab-centric network with the by far largest audience in Arab countries.
This, then, was a missed opportunity in public diplomacy in that it did not aim for and did not get the attention of the largest segment of the targeted audience. As the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll of the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland found by surveying representative samples of the public in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, taken together al-Jazeera has 53% of the audience whereas al-Arabiya has only 9%. Similarly, a December 2008 survey found that more than 50% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza al-Jazeera was the most watched satellite television compared to 10% for al-Arabiya.
Unlike traditional diplomacy or government-to-government communications—often during person-to-person contacts--, public diplomacy is directed to foreign publics and therefore must aim at reaching the largest number of people. You do not have to agree with the medium of communication as long as you are assured that an interview, a speech, and messages in whatever form are aired in their original form. In other words, al-Jazeera, not al-Arabiya, is the by far best platform for public diplomacy with Arabs and Muslims.
During the Cold War, the U.S. had its own, powerful and credible broadcast system with the “Voice of America,” “Radio Free Europe,” and many other outlets. Al-Hurra television and Sawa radio, the two Arab-language vehicles created after 9/11 to counter the anti-American messages in the Arab and Muslim world are not even close to the Voice of America type of communication vehicles of the past—not in quality and credibility, or quantity of viewership. In the five countries included in the 2008 Arab poll, merely 2% of the respondents named al-Hurra as the TV network they watched most often--on the West Bank and Gaza, even fewer people--0.2%--said there preferred television network was al-Hurra.
Source: The 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll of the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland
All told, as the Obama administration and especially the Department of State put more emphasis on public diplomacy than administrations and state departments in the more recent past, they need to select the most potent, existing vehicles to communicate their messages and, ideally, create new ones as well.
I think it's more than message. The proof is in the pudding. As the Cold War progressed, both sides propagandized skillfully, but the side-by-side comparison between East and West increasingly favored the West, as led by us, in Europe and East Asia. As such, our message was empowered by fact, or at least the perception of fact within our competitors' societies.
What's the side-by-side comparison in the Arab Middle East that can empower our message like a rising West Germany or South Korea did during the Cold War? Israel, unfortunately, can't work for that purpose, despite many favorable qualities. Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Kuwait? Qatar? Jordan? Um, no.
The *only* current candidate in the Arab Middle East that may become serviceable as the legitimizer for our message is Iraq. In order for the American-led reform message to be credible and, more importantly, effective in the Arab Middle East, rising Iraq is the key.
Clinton's Iraq Liberation Act and Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom were foundational steps toward that end. It's now up to Obama to continue the progressive work of his predecessors and nurture Iraq to be the cornerstone of hope and change in the Arab Middle East.
Posted by: Eric Chen | February 28, 2009 at 01:58 AM