Propaganda doesn’t help AmericaBy Andres Martinez
[It is] troubling to those of us who have lived in other countries and always admired the distinctive candor of public discourse in this country.
Spin is nothing new in American politics, but the Bush administration has not contented itself with trying to influence the news. It’s in the business of producing the news itself, in the hopes of passing it off as generic, third-party reporting. This is propaganda parading as journalism, in the finest PRI (or Soviet) tradition. …
This clumsy branding of George W. Bush’s vision of America to Americans will not only backfire at home, it invariably subverts efforts to brand America overseas. Public candor and transparency are supposed to be one of the American brand’s distinguishing assets. Because the administration insists on operating in its imagined version of reality, the United States and American credibility begin to look rather commonplace — and unreliable — to the world. You can imagine how many conspiracy theories are fed and validated on the streets of Cairo and Tehran when word gets out that U.S. government agencies produce their own propagandistic “news” reports.
Monday’s naming of Karen Hughes as the State Department’s global spinmeister — the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs — should make matters worse. She is close to Bush and closely associated with his remarkably evasive communications strategy. This White House stays relentlessly on message, even if the facts mock its discipline. …
It must be tempting for the leader of the sole superpower to imagine that he can define reality and impose it on the rest of world. But it’s a dangerous temptation as the United States, for all its might, depends to an alarming degree on the trust of foreigners — increasingly the trust of a handful of Asian central banks — who are financing the nation’s rising debt. The United States borrows $2 billion a day from overseas to maintain Americans’ lavish lifestyle — a factoid you won’t hear about in any taxpayer-financed fake news report.
Foreign central banks buy U.S. currency, in the form of Treasury notes, the way you buy stock in a company. Trouble is, they also can sell it the way you can dump stock when you lose faith in a company. The plummeting dollar is a global vote of no confidence in Brand U.S.A. and its current management. This decline is likely to accelerate if the administration doesn’t begin to be more candid about the nation’s real problems, such as the government’s budgetary shortfalls, and take them on. Foreign investors don’t want to trust their money to a country governed by propagandists. That’s why they invested in the United States in the first place.