Podcast Blues

Posted on August 25, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

NOTE Sept. 12: Amb. Chris Stevens, who is mentioned in this post, was killed alongside three other American diplomats during an assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Stevens becomes the first American ambassador killed in service since 1988. At least as many ambassadors, if not more, have been killed in service as flag officers in combat in the history of the U.S. diplomatic corps. In deference to and as a small record of Amb. Stevens’ long service, and in spite of the mild critique he is subject to here, I am leaving the rest of this post in the original.

——————–

Buried on YouTube is an intriguing and expanding experiment in Internet-enabled public diplomacy. Beginning a few years ago, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) started short video profiles of American ambassadors bound for exotic posts abroad. This is a way to introduce themselves to the countries where they will be serving, the bilateral agenda they’ll be promoting, and maybe get some of that social media mojo everybody’s been talking about. IIP stood up a video production capability in 2008 and is producing by its count an astonishing 300 video products a year.

Typically for a federal agency, these introductory videos – 16 are live, which setting aside consulates and other missions represents about a tenth of our diplomatic representation abroad – are produced with gusto but manifestly uneven style and quality. So this is a friendly critique with suggestions for how these videos can get better and find the audience they are clearly intended to reach.

DON’T KILL A GOOD IDEA TO SPITE THE BAD

The first thing to say – before the bureaucracy goes defensive and crushes a creative, progressive idea out of instinctive reflex to criticism, like Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men – is this is good and should continue. All American ambassadors should do this. The initiative uses a new and evolving technology, it trains our top diplomats in front of the camera and develops the State Department’s production capacity – all capabilities the department needs and should expand. Please, Hillary, don’t kill this for budgetary reasons or for any stupid or malicious comments somebody logs on your YouTube site!

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IS ALSO THE SMALLEST

Unfortunately there are some systematic problems this initiative will face. And the biggest problem is this: most of the countries profiled by these videos have very low Internet penetration. This is, frankly, the entire problem with Internet-based public diplomacy platforms: it has been seduced by the gossamer Web dreams of high-yield outreach on the cheap, the Digital Diplomats’ snake oil pitch. In reality the world is divided between the wired-up haves – those uncensored, connected and mobile, mostly in the advanced democratic West – and the delinked have-nots, which is most of the rest of the world. Even to reach most of the Internet haves, a major “push” using Internet-based tools usually involves an expensive, labor-intensive, multi-modal campaign that soundly pounds the dream of inexpensive Web riches to gold dust.

This is almost immediately clear when looking at the traffic numbers for the videos, which in one case (Mongolia) is in the low double digits. Kosovo has the highest traffic, but that’s because Kosovo is the most pro-American country in Europe. Still, Internet penetration in Kosovo is only about 20 percent (by contrast, the U.S. has an Internet penetration of 78.3 percent; in Japan it’s 80%; Iceland tops the list at 97.8 percent). The rest of the view rates for these videos span the mid-hundreds.

But the plain obstacle is the countries themselves: Bangladesh, Vietnam, Equador, Nicaragua, Uganda, Mongolia and Libya have some of the lowest rates of Internet penetration in the world. (Among these countries, Bangladesh ranks lowest; North Korea is at the bottom.) Of course, with the Internet in the “rest of the world,” you’re producing for a self-selecting minority, which is fine. But IIP clearly needs the resources to do a much better job of promotion to get these videos to their intended audience.

Continuing to produce these introductory videos makes sense but they need to be promoted properly and in the right technological context. Can these be pushed out to mobile phones, screened in schools or for civic organizations, or in other public diplomacy venues? They shouldn’t sit on a server never to see an audience in countries that have dramatically less Internet access than we are used to in the developed world.

LESS IS MORE

Many of these videos feel both overproduced and as if they are trying to do and say more than the video can bear. The videos are professionally shot and edited, and benefit from a surfeit of imagery captured from our traveled Secretary of State and President while abroad. Nonetheless, it seems like the producer or editors is worried the viewer will lose interest unless he or she is bombarded with multiple camera angles, smash cuts, sliding transitions, music, and the rest. There is no uniformity of style or format among the videos. I’m inclined to suggest that less is more.

I wonder if the scriptwriters were able to settle on a single theme in each video – instead of the usual smorgasbord of official priorities – around which to build a coherent narrative or tell personal stories. Then they could build both audience interest in the individual ambassador and learn about one subject in depth rather than skate over a half-dozen or so issues that the official “relationship” will concern itself with. I’ll get into more specific ideas about how this can be done in a minute.

THE POWER OF BABEL

Language is impossible to avoid when viewing all of these introductions. Some ambassadors speak the native language, some don’t. Some are clearly very good at speaking foreign languages, and some are not. Some should speak foreign languages but don’t. Why?

It’s important to assert first that speaking English is fine. When I was at NATO, the interpreters specifically advised us to speak the language we were most comfortable with, which is usually our mother tongue. Writing from experience, that’s especially important for speaking on camera. Most of the world speaks or is learning English and doesn’t mind the opportunity to practice, especially if what they’re hearing is subtitled. In the case of the U.S. Ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, speaking an Indian language would be impractical and impolitic (there are simply too many languages and topolects spoken in India), and her obvious grasp of location names based on a prior tour demonstrates her respect for the country and its cultures.

Several ambassadors speak Spanish of varying degrees of proficiency. Truly impressive, however, are Ambassador Tracey Jacobsen, who learned Albanian to go to Kosovo, and Ambassador Dan Mozena, who learned Bengali to serve in Bangladesh. Mozena’s commitment to Bengali is particularly poignant, and he and wife demonstrate a sincere, effusive warmth that is obvious on camera. This combination of attributes on the part of all three of them clearly endeared them to their audiences based on the positive responses I read on the YouTube site. (I would only note, although this is certainly not Jacobsen’s fault, that her Albanian is subtitled in Serbian for the contentious Serb minority in Kosovo, but in Latin script. Serbian is normally written in Cyrillic.)

But for Ambassador Michael McFaul and Ambassador Chris Stevens, our representatives to Russia and Libya, respectively, they both speak at length about working in the former Soviet Union and North Africa but record their videos in English. Stevens was the official U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. McFaul generated the recent “reset” on relations with Moscow. Both, to my knowledge, speak the local language, but neither did so for these videos. It’s a difficult argument to balance, I admit, but viewers will wonder why the American ambassador to Kosovo speaks Albanian but the ambassador to Libya, with two decades of experience in the Arab world doesn’t speak Arabic on camera. The same could be said for McFaul.

CRINGE LESS

This leads me to the only really bad video of the batch, Ambassador David Shear, our representative to Vietnam. This was hard to watch because it was so transparently staged and because it stood in such poor contrast to the others. Here, Shear is seen taking language lessons in Vietnamese and eating at a Vietnamese restaurant. This is poor form, especially given the extraordinary effort Jacobsen and Mozena made to learn very difficult and obscure languages like Albanian and Bengali. The Vietnamese may be forgiven for wondering why out of the 1.2 million speakers of Vietnamese in the United States (the third-most spoken Asian language here), one couldn’t be appointed Ambassador.

The Vietnamese are also no doubt aware of both our obesity epidemic and the immigrant-entrepreneurs – most of whom are refugees from the war – who own those restaurants. Shear, probably trying to cast himself as a humble naïf learning the language and culture of a country he is about to serve in, instead communicates an embarrassing ignorance of the country in which he will soon be head of mission. He should be the expert on Vietnam. The worst evidence of this deafness to tone is when he vows to consult the “many people with experience working in Vietnam”: at last count, there were 2.59 million U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, not including diplomats, journalists and aid workers.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU LIKE BUT WHAT YOU’RE LIKE THAT MATTERS

But in the end, I didn’t feel like I got to know these men and women. Most of them are clearly charismatic and intelligent, which as mediated through video is no small achievement. I learned a few things about them. McFaul is from Montana. Shear likes to eat. Powell is a photographer. Stevens enjoys the outdoors. Ambassador Piper Campbell likes horses. But to borrow a phrase from Nick Hornsby, it’s not what you like but what you’re like that really matters and I didn’t learn much about what they’re like beyond how they were conveyed through the four-inch portal on my computer.

In order for viewers to like, trust and sympathize with your subjects, they have to reveal something about themselves. I recognize this is not the usual approach for career diplomats, who are not reality television stars. And writing as someone who has done work like this, it is simply not easy to do (and doesn’t always “work” when you do it).

The videos are intended to do three things: introduce the ambassador, describe the bilateral relationship, and pitch American foreign policy priorities. It’s a big ask. But it can be done. And it can be done well.

By way of an example, watch this, a video featuring the Japanese Consul-General in Memphis, Tennessee, produced by the local Chamber of Commerce. (Full disclosure: a good friend was part of the team that produced this series, but he no longer works for the Chamber.) You can tell right away that you’re watching something completely different. The CG plays in a band, in public, in Memphis. He loves music and talks about how important Memphis is both to Japan for trade and to the small Japanese community in the city. He appears on camera, of course, but the audio track was taped in a studio, in a more relaxed setting, probably based on a structured interview. As a result, the video feels intimate and subtle, like you’re part of a conversation. And despite the higher production values, it was probably easier to put this video together because the voice track was taped and edited later with the camera footage shot on location.

The important thing to remember is that this was produced by the Chamber to sell Memphis. There are several other videos like this one profiling small business owners, some of which are quite compelling and moving. But that doesn’t seem to detract from getting to know the individuals and learning what motivates them in their work. IIP could learn from videos like these – maybe even collaborate with the National Symphony Orchestra the way the Chamber partnered with the Memphis Symphony, which commissioned original work to score the videos as part of the promotional campaign.

What strikes me most about the Chamber campaign videos is they tell a story not just about the individuals but about the city. As my friend told me, Memphis is not all blues and barbecue: It’s a place that people love, where the subjects of the videos have decided to settle and to start their families and businesses.

To understand how effective these ambassadorial videos could be, start by substituting Mongolia for Memphis. What is the American community like there? What are some of the experiences the ambassadors have had that explain who we are, what we’re like, and what we have in common with the countries where they’re posted? Only when we talk about that do we really begin to reach people. And when we start doing that, we begin to cross those last three feet, in Edward R. Murrow’s famous formulation. Even over the Internet, that remains public diplomacy’s most important territory.

###

How to understand “Swiftboating”

Posted on August 19, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

The Raid, May 2, 2011 (White House Photo by Pete Souza)

A new thread coursing through the U.S. presidential campaign has been an attack on President Obama’s alleged disclosures regarding the raid last year that killed Osama bin Laden. A 501(c)(4) political action committee called the Special Operations OPSEC [Operational Security] Education Fund has asserted that the Administration’s disclosures regarding the operations — particularly the revelation that SEAL Team Six carried out the May 2, 2011 mission — have seriously compromised the operational security, safety and effectiveness of covert military and paramilitary units like the Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force, and CIA. They may have a point. In August later that year, 15 SEALS from the same team were killed when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. Operational Security in the region, where infiltration and “green on blue” violence is a growing threat, is a vigilent concern.

The President’s supporters view this attack not as a benign public informational campaign on behalf of servicemen but as a hollow-point partisan attack benefiting the campaign of Republican Gov. Mitt Romney. After all, didn’t President George W. Bush land dramatically on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to announce in front of a roaring crew that “major combat operations in Iraq are over”? Didn’t Coalition Provisional Authority administrator J. Paul Bremer crow “We got ’em!” after Saddam Hussein was apprehended? Surely there can’t be some sour grapes that after ten years the main target of Tora Bora was killed under a Democratic Administration?

But the President’s campaign immediately pushed back on the group’s 20-minute documentary by referring to it as “swift boat tactics,” a reference to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the organization that very effectively derailed the campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry in 2004. Conceptually, Swiftboating is so commonplace now that the campaign spokesman didn’t even have to explain himself, but it’s important to really understand what he’s getting at. Swiftboating is a modern political tactic but it is not particularly new, nor is it eminently Republican (or American). When the campaign uses the term, it is shorthand for lying. But the tactic is more sophisticated than that.

What we know as “swiftboating” is, in modern electoral politics, the tactic of attacking your opponent’s strong point. This seems counterintuitive, especially since politics is often equated to war or sports, when the frontal assault is usually a quick way to die. But Karl Rove, the contemporary master of this stroke, once said, “I don’t attack people on their weaknesses. That usually doesn’t get the job done. Voters already perceive weaknesses. You’ve got to go after the other guy’s strengths.” (Emphasis added.) And the reason is this: with their backbones broken, your opponents can no longer support the weight of their convictions. In war, attacking a weak point is critical to a breakthrough. But in politics, if you attack an enemy’s strong point and destroy it, you leave him with nothing at all.

That was Kerry’s critical mistake in 2004. He held himself up as a war hero against his opponent’s more ambiguous service record. But his own political history was more complicated than his Naval record in Vietnam — he was outspoken against that war, flip-flopped on Iraq war funding — and left himself vulnerable to an assault on his own, self-selected selling point: “My name is John Kerry, and I am reporting for duty.” Once doubts were raised, it was hard to claim that he was much better than the alternative.

Again, this is not a uniquely Republican tactic. The “wimp factor” was maliciously applied to George H. W. Bush, a genuine war hero if there ever was one: a volunteer after Pearl Harbor at 19, the youngest naval aviator at 20, shot down over the Pacific and rescued by a submarine after losing his navigator. And right now, the Obama camp has taken a golden opportunity to attack Romney’s business record. As with Kerry, all’s fair in politics: Romney is publicly running on his experience as a venture capitalist, and that practically begs for a closer look at what that experience actually was.

If the “swift boat” analogy to the OPSEC challenge is true, the Obama Administration and campaign should simply treat it for what it is, an attack on a strength. Barack Obama made, in the words of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “one of the gutsiest calls I have ever seen a president make,” and ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The previous President and a Republican president would have had to made a similar judgment. A well-trained American serviceman pulled the trigger and the intelligence apparatus delivered the right information for him to act on. But ultimately — and the OPSEC men should know this — given the mission’s fraught political context, only the President could make that call that brought hell’s torment to the world’s most wanted man.

And the President made the right one — unlike, I would add, so many made before him.

###

Riot Girls

Posted on August 8, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Pussy Riot band members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (left), Maria Alyokhina (right) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (center), during their trial July 23. Photo Credit: Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images via Foreign Policy magazine.

Almost everything that needs to be said about the case of Pussy Riot, the Russian all-female punk rock band now awaiting a verdict in a “hooliganism” trial in Moscow, has been said. Nobody seriously doubts this is a political show trial in the old Soviet sense and that the Putin regime isn’t punishing this punk band as a warning to other would-be opponents of the state.

But some points can still be made. First, the prosecutors insist this is not a “political” prosecution. This is progress, sort of. I think they protest too much. (I’ll sidestep my usual baliwick of trying to parse what they mean by political or the political aesthetic because I don’t know the Russian etymology.) It assumes the legitimacy of political expression in Russia despite the state propaganda barrage against the band. With tens of thousands of Russians still on the streets protesting the regime, it assumes there is still a political space to occupy that hasn’t been completely co-opted by the regime. That space can still be enlarged and separated from the thugocratic “government” running the country from the Kremlin.

For a taste of what the band members (three of the five are on trial: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich. The band name is in English, not Russian.) — have faced (in English) enjoy the bluntly sophisticated attacks of RT.com. Their story is buried on the site, even though when you search the site you’ll find highly misleading text stories (“‘Let Pussy Riot Go!’ Veteran Russian HR group speaks out”) pegged to the actual broadcast segments that have nothing to do with the headlines (in this case, a story about how the trial would be broadcast live over the Internet — which is probably not true). The lead article on the Pussy Riot when I visited RT — an “op-ed,” incidentally — essentially questioned the hype after all the broadcast segments had touted the worldwide focus on the trial.

Second, the band has been favorably compared to protest acts of the past, including Fela Kuti of Nigeria and the Plastic People of the Universe, both personal favorites. (Not incidentally, the Plastics have given a benefit concert for Pussy Riot.) I am particularly inclined to find parallels with the Plastics but it is not because the Plastics were a political act because they were avowedly apolitical, which is what made them such a transformative act. Their stories also share the show trial aspect, with Pussy Riot facing the absurd charges of “hooliganism” and “religious hatred” and the Plastics charged under “organized disturbance of the peace”.

But perhaps most importantly, they share in common something very special and important at this moment, which is a certain vulnerability. Unlike the megalithic oligarchs whom Putin targeted during the last decade — the Khodorkovskys, Berezovskys and Gusinskys, who were so rich and powerful as to evoke very little sympathy when they were prosecuted — the Pussy Riot unmasked of their provocative balaclavas turn out to be very young women. Indeed, two of them are recent mothers and not one of them is over 30. To see them is to see not your mother but your daughter, wife or sister.

This is what their trial shared with the Plastics: the unmistakable recognition that in prosecuting these women the state had at last overreached, that in its paranoia and pursuit of control it finally achieved an essential injustice. What was historically important about the Plastics’ arrest, of course, was that the trial united the disparate strands of the disunited opposition. Perhaps the same will happen — is happening — in Russia today.

Of course it’s impossible to know if this is the Russian public’s understanding of the trial, in a state that dominates virtually all media. Only the Internet is partially free in Russia, and I am inclined to be pessimistic about the triumphant and righteous tone the Western media has taken regarding the rights of Pussy Riot.

Because the issue is not about the freedoms we take for granted here. It is about three women who are about to go to prison for the freedoms they don’t have. It is very easy to talk about these freedoms from behind the protection of an American passpor t to those who don’t have them. Of course all those who support these women do it to give them heart, to let them know we know what is at stake and that what they are doing is important beyond their own personal ordeal.

But let us understand how much, much harder it is to demand those freedoms — to perform for them, to go to jail for them, to risk your life for them — before an armed state hostile to you and willing to imprison or kill you for your beliefs.

Thank the Mother of God that punk is not dead. May she watch and protect her daughters on earth.

###