Martha Bayles: Hearts and Minds

Last week the Senate actually did something good. It unanimously passed a bill (S. 3104) to authorize funding for Radio Free Asia (RFA) on a permanent — as opposed to a temporary — basis. Co-sponsored by Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Ted Kaufman, D-Del., Al Franken, D-Min., Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Jim Webb, D-Va., the bill “indicates the importance we place on the free flow of information, particularly in countries noted for their lack of an open press,” said Lugar.

RFA has a shorter pedigree than Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which date back to the early Cold War and now broadcast to the former Soviet republics and the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan region. And RFA bears very little resemblance to the 1951 effort to broadcast into Mao’s China. Like RFE/RL, that effort was initially funded by the CIA. But unlike RFE/RL, it ended after only two years, because while many Eastern Europeans and Russians owned shortwave receivers, few Chinese did. And shortwave is the only radio signal that can penetrate a large continent from outside its borders.

Today’s RFA was launched in the mid-1990s, to broadcast domestic news and information into seven countries: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. In eight of its nine language services (Cantonese, Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese) it has won prestigious awards for on-the-ground reporting and a sustained defense of human rights — in a region that, according to Freedom House, has seen an increase in media censorship over the last five years.

The Mandarin service poses a bigger challenge, because unlike RFE/RL’s Russian Service, it never had the chance to cut a deal with a post-Communist government to operate through local FM affiliates. This deal looked promising in the 1990s but lasted only as long as other press freedoms in post-Soviet Russia. When Putin came to power, he ordered a media crackdown that included closing all of RFE/RL’s affiliates. Because shortwave is no longer used by Russians, that leaves RFE/RL relying largely on the Internet, which today limits its reach to less than 30 percent of the population.

RFA has consistently refused to negotiate with Beijing, which makes it look less naive than RFE/RL, not to mention less compromised than certain U.S. businesses (Yahoo, Google, Facebook) whose liberty-loving image has been sullied by their cooperation with the Chinese authorities’ repression of dissidents. But RFA pays a price for its integrity. Today it too relies mainly on the Internet, and you know how much fun that can be in the PRC.

Still, the Senate did the right thing. With enough money (the appropriated kind), RFA could do a lot more with its Mandarin service, and perhaps find another media platform that would work even better. How about a shortwave receiver that looks like an iPad?

“We care about the small people.” Thus spake Carl-Henric Svanberg, trying last week to plug the gusher of bad press pummeling British Petroleum. He even cited President Obama as another dignitary willing to condescend to the Lilliputians of the Gulf Coast. One New Orleans resident spoke for all red-blooded Americans when he retorted, “We’re not small people. We’re human beings. They're no greater than us. We don’t bow down to them.”

By day’s end, Svanberg was apologizing and BP was pleading mistranslation (apparently, the words small and people mean something different in Svanberg’s mother tongue, Swedish). But it was too late to reverse the damage  done by CEO Tony Hayward, a man who opens his mouth only to change feet. Promising to honor “all legitimate claims” and asked for some examples of illegitimate ones, he replied, “This is America — come on.” He also told Congress it was “too early” to say whether there was “any evidence that anybody put costs above safety.” And most memorably, he whined, “I want my life back.”

Bob Dudley, Hayward’s replacement, is a native of Mississippi and a graduate of Southern Methodist University, so he’s not likely to commit the same gaffes. This changeover is badly needed, because we Yanks don’t take kindly to comments like Svanberg’s, which activate our egalitarianism, and attitudes like Hayward’s, which bring back memories of King George III and “Don’t Tread On Me.”

In other words, Americans are just as proud and touchy as everyone else.

Something to keep in mind whenever the debate over public diplomacy reverts to the default position of Let the private sector do it. The most obvious recent example would be Charlotte Beers, the former CEO of Ogilvy & Mather who became under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the aftermath of 9/11. Not the first Madison Avenue guru to try “selling America,” Beers did what came naturally: she put together a TV ad campaign highlighting the religious and other freedoms enjoyed by Muslims in America.

Ogilvy & Mather are good at what they do. Indeed, back in 2001 they brilliantly re-branded a certain oil company that, due to a bad accident and spill, was having image issues. Ogilvy & Mather replaced that company’s infelicitous shield-shaped logo with a green, blue, and yellow sunburst, and surround that pretty image with pretty words about how the firm was investing in wind, solar, and other eco-friendly energy sources.

You already know the name of that company, which was promptly lambasted for hypocritically “greenwashing” its image. Right now there’s a contest being held to re-design its logo yet again.

You also know what happened to Beers’s advertising campaign. It was not such a bad idea, except that it ignored the concerns of its audience. Most Middle Eastern Arabs already know that life is good in America. Their objections, right or wrong, are to the policies of the U.S. government. And the only way to deal with that type of audience is to address their concerns.

This does not mean caving in. The art of public diplomacy, very different from that of advertising, is to engage people over and over, to listen patiently to their complaints and objections, to show that you appreciate their point of view, and then to explain as clearly as possible why your government is doing what it’s doing. The private-sector equivalent would be to keep running the same ad campaign even though no one is buying. The point is not to move product, it’s to keep the lines of communication open.

If you think this is a useless exercise, just imagine how Americans would feel if, instead of finding a more suitable representative to talk to us in our own language, BP were to simply cut us off.

Thanks to strong defense from American goalie Tim Howard and a fumble by his English counterpart, Robert Green, America did not lose its first game in this year’s World Cup. Instead, the match in South Africa’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium was a draw: 1–1. And as ESPN’s Jemele Hill put it, “The draw was a gift.”

Does this mean Joe the Plumber will soon be getting out his vuvuzela to cheer on Bob Bradley and the team? Not really. Americans enjoy playing the game we call soccer (and everyone else calls futbol), but it’s definitely not part of our “hegemonic sports culture.” According to political scientist Andrei Markovits, we save our love for the “Big Three and One-Half”: baseball, football (our kind), basketball, and ice hockey.

Why is that? One reason, offered by sports journalist Stefan Fatsis, is that until the late 19th century, Americans played two versions of “the kicking game” — one hands-on, one hands-off. But then in 1875, Harvard led Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Rutgers down the path of hands-on football (heavy armor to follow), and the hands-off style of playing faded away.

Another reason highlighted in Markovits’s books is that futbol was spread by the British Empire, along with the Queen’s English and the custom of wearing ratty-looking wigs in courtrooms. If you’ve ever watched a cricket match in India, this point will need no further elaboration.

Decidedly not part of the Empire, we Yanks took a hard nativist line, turning British rounders and rugby into baseball and football, and dubbing our own national competitions “World Series” and “World Championships.” Spend five minutes talking about sports with a foreigner, and you’ll get an earful about how solipsistic this looks to others.

I have my own theory about America’s lack of interest in futbol: too much of the action takes place overseas, and as everyone knows, Americans tend to be ignorant about — and worse, indifferent to — the world beyond our water’s edge.

In America’s defense, it should be noted that this is a huge country, with more than enough regional and cultural diversity for Joe the Plumber to sort out — who has time to sort out all those other countries, too? One could also say, America is insular compared to what? Are there a lot of other countries out there as big and varied as America, where ordinary people take a lively interest in the world beyond their borders? I can’t think of any.

Still, it’s a pity more Americans don’t pay attention to the “beautiful game” beloved by the 95 percent of humanity who are not Americans. Maybe this will change if the World Cup comes to our shores in 2018 or 2022. This decision will be made in December by FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. (Now, if only we could get them to translate that into English ... )

Photo by Clive Davis, Cookham, England

Since Jeffrey Goldberg used it on his Atlantic blog and Michael Chabon picked it up in The New York Times, the word of the week is seichel, defined by Goldberg as connoting “wisdom, ... ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person with seichel “looks for a clever way out of problems,” “understands that the most direct way —  blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, and (most important) can foresee consequences of his actions.”

Both Goldberg and Chabon regard last week’s attack on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara as totally lacking in seichel. 

Translated into ancient Greek, seichel would be sophrosune, a word connoting shrewdness, gutsiness, persistence, grace — and alertness. Above all, alertness: the capacity to pay attention, to read people’s motives, to grasp the moral imperative at work — and to act. The embodiment of sophronuse is Odysseus, Homer’s “great tactician,” but Odysseus makes one big mistake. Having escaped the clutches of the mighty Cyclops, he succumbs to hubris (the opposite of sophronuse) and taunts the one-eyed monster by telling him it was “Odysseus, raider of cities,” who blinded him. The Cyclops complains to Poseidon, god of the sea, who sends a violent storm to drown Odysseus’s crew and delay his homecoming by a decade.

Who is the Cyclops in the Mavi Marmara incident? Who else but the one-eyed monster of our time: the illuminated screen? On TV and the Internet, the battle of the citizen videos began immediately; the European, Turkish, and Arab media sputtered outrage; the dovish Israeli media agonized; and the hawkish Israeli comedy troupe Latma TV posted “We Con the World,” a parody of the 1985 aid-to-Africa song, “We Are the World.”

The latter attempt is about as witty as a Center for Security Policy–funded video can get. But it’s not going to outwit the monster. To avoid being shipwrecked by world opinion, Israel is going to need more a lot more seichel and a lot less ... How do you say hubris in Yiddish?

“Nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse . . . Just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented.” Thus did literary critic Dwight MacDonald ridicule

Life magazine’s “attempts at popular education” in his 1960 essay, “Masscult & Midcult.” His point was that we should deplore any medium that cannot properly order its messages.

How tame MacDonald’s juxtaposition seems today, when anyone with a TV remote can click from an angry preacher denouncing moral decadence to “Telephone,” the latest video from Lady Gaga, in which she plays a freaky sexpot inmate in a creepy women’s prison who escapes to join Beyoncé in a diner, where they gleefully poison all the customers. Long accustomed to such indigestible contrasts, we Americans just shrug and keep on surfing.

But is everyone in the world so wearily postmodernist? Not according to a report issued last month by the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS) at Cambridge University. Titled Religious Broadcasting in the Middle East, it surveys some of the better known Islamic, Christian, and Jewish TV channels in the region, with an eye to how well they address the concerns of ordinary people struggling to stay true to their faith while coping with rapid, unsettling change.

A leading vector of change is, of course, Arab satellite TV, which now carries over 500 channels in a state of disorder that would give Dwight MacDonald the fits. At one point the report states that this wide-open mediascape leads to a “‘schizophrenic’ culture” in which it is “easy for viewers to flick between a religious channel and a music clip channel.” To their credit, the authors do not shrug at this but rather declare it a topic in need of analysis.

But unfortunately, their  report provides no such analysis. In part, this may be due to the underdeveloped state of market research in the region. Even when Arab media companies keep track of audience and budget figures (most do not), they prefer not to reveal them — part of what Habib Battah of the Journal of Middle East Broadcasters calls a “tradition of non-disclosure.” Recently the Nielsen company has opened a Middle Eastern branch, but so far there is still no objective ratings system. Therefore, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that even the biggest Arab media companies remain basically vanity operations run by Gulf billionaires.

One such billionaire is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, benefactor of CIS. Like Rupert Murdoch, who just bought nine percent of his company, Alwaleed should have more than a passing interest in the schizophrenic culture of Arab media, because it exists within his own music and entertainment company, Rotana. Reputed to be the largest in the Arab market, Rotana operates two satellite TV channels devoted to racy (Arab) pop music and one, al-Resalah, devoted to religion.

According to the CIS report, the mission of al-Resalah is to “serve Islam and change young people’s ideas about terrorism.” But apart from a passing reference to appearances by celebrity preachers Amr Khaled and Tarek al-Suwaidan (the Kuwaiti businessman who is also the channel’s general manager), the actual religious programming on al-Resalah is not addressed. Indeed, the only program mentioned in the report is “The Leaders’ Training Academy,” modeled on “The Apprentice,” an American reality show in which aspiring business types vie for the favor of Donald Trump.

It is disappointing to see such cursory treatment of the prince’s own religious channel, because al-Resalah has been criticized for hosting guests who spew hatred at Israel and the West. To be sure, the sole source of this criticism is Steven Stalinsky of MEMRI, an organization known for a certain selectivity with regard to the evidence. But if Prince Alwaleed is really devoted to helping Muslims deal with cultural schizophrenia, then it would behoove him to demand more from an academic institution bearing his name. At the moment, there’s more information about al-Resalah on Wikipedia than can be found in this report.