Thursday, January 26, 2012

January 26



"[T]he prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many."

--W.J. Hennigan, "New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable? The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier," Los Angeles Times; image from article, with caption: The X-47B drone, above, marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

NEW BLOG

From The Director - "Welcome to our new feature, a place the VOA Director will use to share his comments on current issues and affairs. The inaugural posting discusses international satellite jamming."

Be sure to check back for new comments on topical issues. Image of VOA's 28th Director, David Ensor, from his new blog. Via JT.

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

The Public Diplomacy of Drones -  Matt Armstrong, MountainRunner: "Public diplomacy and strategic communication must be on the take-offs of drones, not just the landings, crash landings or otherwise."

Hall induction a reflection of Kwan's stature - Bonnie D. Ford, espn.go.com: "Kwan's grace of expression, coupled with fierce will, kept her at the top of her sport from girlhood well into her 20s. She twirled into collective memory as an understudy warming up in the wings of the grandiose Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan drama. She came of age the season she played the sultry Salome and went on to win five world championships, yet left competition with her greatest wish, an Olympic gold medal, unfulfilled. Along the way, Kwan managed to be both ethereal and endearingly flesh-and-blood.

Her body of work made her upcoming induction into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame a foregone conclusion. ... Kwan was named the country's first Public Diplomacy Envoy, and has made half a dozen overseas trips with government delegations. She rubs shoulders with ambassadors and policy-makers and interacts with young people in her unpaid role. Kwan also serves on the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition and the Special Olympics' board of directors. She earned a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University last spring and moved to Washington. She rarely skates any more, preferring to practice yoga several days a week." Kwan image from article, with caption: Along with being a public diplomacy envoy, Michelle Kwan also serves on the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition and the Special Olympics' board of directors.

BBG gets a Director of Communications and External Affairs - Matt Armsrong, Mountain.Runner: "The Broadcasting Board of Governors announced today that Lynne Weil has been named Director of Communications and External Affairs. She starts February 6. The BBG, as many know, is in dire need to improve its engagement with the Hill and the public. Lynne, in leaving her job as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (and Public Affairs), brings extensive knowledge of and relations with Congress and the media to the BBG.

Lynne will be the second Director of Communications and External Affairs as the position was (relatively) recently established. Diane Zeleny held the position briefly last year. She will not be wanting for work to keep her busy, especially in the coming year." Weil image from. See also.

Broadcasting to Burma: VOA sees RFA's TV bid, and raises - Kim Andrew Elliott reporting on International Broadcasting

RT's "Assange Diplomacy" - Yelena Osipova, Global Chaos: "[O]n January 23, Assange announced that he will be starting a new TV show; today, Russia Today announced that it will be hosting the show. There you go. ... As for RT itself, we should take it as another chance to poke the U.S. (even more). But what use of it for public diplomacy? Many Americans already take RT for a joke, that is, if they know about or watch it (which many don't). Is it how Russia is trying to get its message out to the English-speaking world? And yes, although there are also many with whom Wikileaks and Assange's message might have resonated, I doubt they will be happy to see him on RT (out of all places). His credibility is now in shatters, while RT is jubilant to be getting some more bad press. Seems like their 'measurement' of success is limited to quantity (i.e. the amount of attention they get), while completely forgetting about the quality of it: the type of coverage and its effects on foreign attitudes towards Russia. After all, bad press canNOT be good press in public diplomacy: therein lies its core difference from PR."

Future of the BBC: Lord Patten ruffles the Beeb's feathers - A McE, The Economist: "The BBC’s chairman Lord Patten has had an eventful week. On Monday, he confirmed The Economist’s report of two weeks ago ('Auntie’s Big Year') that he was already looking for a new Director General to succeed Mark Thompson, the present incumbent. Today at a conference, he delivered a wide-ranging speech on the corporation’s future, laying out several demands about its scope and substance. ... It is ... quite right to call for 'boldness and experimentation'. That demand will be heard by the array of candidates to succeed Mr Thompson. Less clear is which of the leading candidates it favours. George Entwistle, the present director of BBC Vision, is relatively new to the job, intellectually sharp and more likely to shake up some existing orthodoxies than other candidates.

But charter renewal – due in 2017 – is always a difficult political fight. That will benefit Caroline Thompson, a senior management figure, with a surer grasp of the public diplomacy involved and long service on the BBC executive. Helen Boaden, a highly competent director of News, is favoured by many insiders, but may rank as a candidate who favours the status quo too firmly." Image from

PM asks press officers to highlight govt policies - pakobserver.net: "Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani while emphasizing upon the significance of public diplomacy called upon the press officers posted in Pakistan’s Missions abroad to remain focused in highlighting the national policies so as to reflect the real image of Pakistan. He was talking to the group of press officers participating in the annual Consultative Conference being organized by the External Publicity Wing of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, here at the Prime Minister’s House Wednesday. The Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Dr. Firdaus Ashiq Awan was also present during the occasion. The Prime minister said that the challenges being faced by the country today require a proactive approach by the professional officers working in the field of public relations as it would help develop a meaningful linkage with the international community utilizing all possible sources of communication including the media. In the same context he stressed upon the participants of the conference to utilize social media as an effective tool to convey the desired messages."

Ban to Visit Burma; Nambiar Named as Envoy - Lalit K. Jha, irrawaddy.org: "United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday that he is planning to make a trip to Burma in the near future and announced that his chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, will soon transition to become his full-time special envoy to the country. ... Responding to questions from reporters, Ban

said he has already visited Burma twice and that there have been numerous other visits made by top UN officials, including his special envoy. 'Those roles I believe were laying foundations for other international partners to engage. I have been chairing this Group of Friends on Myanmar many times during the last five years on the basis that I could strengthen the international community’s engagement and support for the democratization process in Myanmar,' he said. 'Of course, this is the result of consolidated engagement of all the partners. But I am proud to tell you that whether it has been quiet diplomacy or public diplomacy, I think we have been employing those two approaches all the time, continuously with patience,' Ban said." Ban image from

Haredi rabbi battles religious coercion, violence: Haim Amsalem brings iconoclast’s message in Whippany talk - Gil Hoffman, njjewishnews.com: "At times, Haim Amsalem can sound like a secularist member of Knesset. In fact, he is himself a fervently Orthodox rabbi who lives in Jerusalem’s haredi Har Nof neighborhood. He was elected to Knesset in 2009 as a member of the Sephardi Orthodox Shas Party but broke away following disputes over the party’s attitude to army service, secular studies, and conversion.Now, with the country boiling over with charges of haredi coercion, violence, and intolerance, Amsalem stands to play a key role in bridging the divides between Israel’s secular majority and Orthodox minority. ... Central New Jersey federation executive vice president Stanley Stone said that both his community and MetroWest want to make a positive impact on the quality of life in Israel. Max Kleinman, executive vice president of UJC MetroWest, said he invited Amsalem to the community because he believes it is important for his message to be heard.

The federations 'have been warriors for Israeli hasbara [public diplomacy] and now The New York Times is making it look like Israel is controlled by Jewish ayatollas,' Kleinman said. 'We have to do what we can to support a positive civil society and back liberal standards for conversion to make Israel livable for all Jews and prevent tension with the Diaspora.'” Image from article, with caption: MK Rabbi Haim Amsalem, right, lights the menora with Rabbi Dov Lipman, far left, and the Modern Orthodox Margolese family of Beit Shemesh; eight-year-old Na’ama Margolese’s story of being spat on by Orthodox extremists sparked a flare-up about Israel’s identity last month.

Eight Thoughts About Crowd Sourcing - Niv Caalderon - Crowd Sourcing, Public Diplomacy, New Media: "About: I'm Niv Calderon [.]I write about crowd sourcing, public diplomacy, user experience and new media."

RELATED ITEMS

The coming debate over American ‘strength’ abroad - David Ignatius, Washington Post: What does American “strength” mean in the 21st century? Is it a recovery of the kind of power and prerogative the United States had, say, in the Ronald Reagan years? Or is it something more aligned with changes in the global balance? Zbigniew Brzezinski would favor the latter (The gist of Brzezinski’s strategy is that America must become strong enough to act as “a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East.” He sees a future U.S. role as a “balancer” and “conciliator” among Asian nations that, left to themselves, will get into messy fights). As for Obama’s strategic vision, he talks a better game than he plays. A similar criticism applies to Obama’s foreign policy. He raised hopes at home and abroad because he proposed to resolve festering problems, such as the Palestinian issue. In reality, he flopped. His Afghanistan policy is a muddle, and that’s being charitable. In this campaign, Obama needs to explain how he will lead America past the old slogans and status-quo policies into an era of genuine national revival.

Support for Whacking Iran: Who Needs Propaganda? - Trevor Thrall, nationalinterest.org: The most recent polling reveals an American public willing, albeit by a slim majority, to approve military action in order to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. A decade removed from 9/11, public support for a potential military strike on Iran is almost exactly the same it was for the attack on Iraq.

Though he has certainly put pressure on Iran through multilateral diplomacy and economic sanctions, Obama has spent no time building public support for military action against Iran and relatively little time talking about Iran at all. It is safe to say that if presidential propaganda wasn’t able to do much in the case of Iraq when the president was going all out, it certainly can’t have done much to shape opinion regarding Iran when Obama has (purposely) done so little. Chart from article

Why Doesn't America Ban Iranian Press TV? - Kenneth R. Timmerman, familysecuritymatters.org: Authorities in Britain revoked the license of the Iranian regime’s English-language global television channel known as Press TV because of evidence that it is a propaganda outlet

controlled by the Iranian regime. But the Obama Administration permits the channel to operate on American soil without a license and in violation of U.S. sanctions regulations, which ban commercial transactions with Iran. It appears to be another example of Obama coddling the terrorist regime. Press TV is not the only Iranian government media organization operating in the United States. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) operates Aftab TV, which broadcasts in Persian and operates a prominent website. Image from article

Will this new Bravo series about "fabulous" young Iranian-Americans find its way into Iran? - Kim Andrew Elliott reporting on International Broadcasting

In Battle For Hearts And Minds, Taliban Turn To CDs - Ahmad Shafi, gpb.org: When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, their hard-line policies included a ban on music tapes and videos. Yet now, the Taliban are producing their own CDs in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of Afghans. Since 2005, the Taliban have been mass producing CDs and DVDs featuring footage of alleged NATO atrocities and clips of insurgents battling NATO forces. The CDs and DVDs are readily available in Kabul and other major cities. In some rural areas, the Taliban operate pirate radio transmitters, with the militants broadcasting warnings to local residents and Afghan government officials. NATO has been using social media sites such as Twitter to try to counter the Taliban's propaganda. However, only a small percentage of


Afghans have access to the Internet. NATO has also been supporting some local radio and TV stations, but the Taliban has also shifted tactics, assassinating radio personalities who oppose them. This month, they killed a prominent tribal leader in Kandahar who used his radio station to preach against the Taliban. In the battle for psychological advantage, many analysts believe ISAF, the acronym for the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan, has largely failed to deliver its message. Candace Rondeaux from the International Crisis Group says the Taliban, on the other hand, has improved its propaganda machine over the years. "In the meantime, you know ISAF kind of sat silently. Or they frequently put out these sort of propaganda videos or commercials or radio statements that don't really connect with Afghan realities at all," she said. Image from, with caption: When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, CDs and DVDs were forbidden.

How Do You Escape a Color Revolution? Replace Emotional Reaction With Intellectual Sobriety: Understanding the 21st Century Global Information War: Protect Your Zeitgeist By Eric Pottenger and Jeff Friesen - Color Revolutions andd Geopolitics: More than at any point in history, war is primarily a media war. The reason the United States, in particular, has been so effective in this style of warfare is because the whole structure of U.S. society has been built around promotion and consumption as a pathway to wealth and power. In the United States, the corporate marketing and advertisement industry has merged seamlessly into the operational templates of foreign policy. There is little difference between selling Coca Cola and selling a particular foreign policy initiative. Corporations sell commodities through marketing campaigns and advertisements; governments sell policies through a myriad of techniques of information control and propaganda. Like corporate advertising, propaganda is primarily

effective as a form of emotional communication, not one of critical analysis. The purpose is to promote a prescribed behavior, whether that behavior result in the purchasing of a new pair of blue jeans, the supporting of a social initiative, or advocating one's inclusion amongst a battalion of protesters, each of them dragged willingly into the streets to weaken the stature of a particular government. The propagandist will rarely explain in substantive terms either the problems of society or the concrete solutions. Instead he will brand the issues in broad emotional terms. The opposition movement will likely be branded as “fun,” “rebellious,” or “revolutionary,” etc., whereas the problems of the entire society are made unspecific, reduced to the actions of a “corrupt,” “greedy,” “power-hungry” “dictator.” The goal is to broadcast this message simply and incessantly; and especially to make people believe that it's true. Media should be used to deconstruct the brand the West is selling; it should successfully offer an alternative brand. In a world where the information war reigns supreme, the essence of protecting national sovereignty is change: not change of values, necessarily, but change of attitudes and perspectives. A smart policy would be to embrace this change. Why not lead the struggle off the traditional battlefield and into the media realm: to television and radio broadcasts; to books and blogs and publications? Image from article

Syria's stubborn strongman: Syrian President Bashar Assad rejects an Arab League proposal that could have ended the bloodshed. He needs more incentive to leave - Editorial, latimes.com: On Monday, the European Union ratcheted up its economic and travel sanctions, extending them to 22 more Syrian officials and eight companies. Two senators are introducing legislation to toughen U.S. sanctions, though the United States has few economic dealings with Syria. U.N. sanctions, if they could be negotiated, would add pressure. But sanctions take time, and Assad made it clear this week he has no intention of going anywhere.

The CBC’s Propaganda War - Bruce Bawer, FrontPage Magazine: In Canada, the CBC receives more than $1.5 billion a year from the Canadian government, which amounts to upwards of $100 per household. And what, exactly, are Canadian taxpayers paying for? That’s the question asked – and very illuminatingly answered – by a new documentary, This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC, produced by James Cohen and Fred Litwin.

(The title is a reference to “This Hour Has 22 Minutes,” a long-running CBC series specializing in political satire.) Focusing on two main topics – anti-Israel bias and anti-conservative bias – the documentary consists almost entirely of CBC clips (most but not all of them from news programs) in which we can see these biases in action. To judge by this compilation, the CBC is perhaps even more slanted than the infamously partial BBC – and, perhaps, even more brazen about it. Image from article

Social media: from innovation to revolution - Adeel Amjad, pakistantoday.com: Social media has become a substitute for traditional media, much of which in Pakistan is state-controlled. It's too soon to know how the “political tsunami” will turn out, including whether virtual networks of people can prevail over more traditionally organised groups.

But still, it's already clear that social media via the Web is unprecedented and unpredictable. For authoritarian leaders used to controlling media and events, time and technology are not on their side. It can lead to the improbable rise of leaders who otherwise might never have had a shot. It has helped in gathering of large groups in a short period of time. Amjad image from article

Europe meets superdemocracy - euractiv.com, euractiv.com: In China more than half a billion citizens now have access to the internet. They use it in such a way that today information are well known long before the government body in charge of disseminating information (more accurately propaganda) has done its work. Like Twitter and Facebook in the “Arab Spring”, microblogs like Weibo offer new channels of communication within China and beyond. This is civic empowerment, officially welcomed by the government but in reality deeply questioned, as the Chinese Propaganda Department is now working on legislation to make individual registration of each microblogger in his or her real name mandatory – so that the communist government and others in the future will be able to trace critical opinions. In Finland, which is praised as a safe haven for democrats, things look somewhat different: here the parliament has been encouraged by the forthcoming introduction of the European Citizens’ Initiative to introduce a national equivalent which on the surface appears to be even more accessible than the ECI, because Finns are basically free to propose whatever they would like to see at the national level. The Finnish system also introduces e-collection of signatures at the national level: a first in Europe. However, the downside is that the Finnish parliament has introduced a clause which says that the names of all the signatories of successful initiatives (50,000 signatures have to be gathered within six months) will be fully disclosed after the signatures have been submitted to the parliament - another killer-provision which makes signature-gathering much more difficult, since everyone will know that their names may be published at a later stage and perhaps be used by party-political or other statisticians to track people’s preferences.

Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels - blogdredd.blogspot.com: Edward L. Bernays [named the father of PR] studied the results of his uncle Freud's research into the nature of the subconscious mind. Based upon that study of Freud's work, Bernays went on to prove that Freud was on to something. If Freud was so utterly wrong, Bernays could not have developed such a finely tuned propaganda engine based substantially upon Freud's work. An understanding of propaganda unparalleled in world history and admired not only in America, but also admired by the most infamous propagandists of all time: Bernays work inspired Joseph Goebbels; more than any other individual ... (PR! A Social History of Spin). Joseph Goebbels was the propaganda minister of NAZI Germany under Adolf Hitler.

World War II Timeline in movies - 4 The Propaganda War - tainted-archive.blogspot.com: When war broke out in 1939 Britain's cinemas were closed, however the value of films

in keeping up morale was soon realized and the cinemas were reopened. They had been closed for only ten days before an Parliament decided to reopen them and they became the main source of entertainment and recreation during the troubled times. The movies were effective in saying that the old class system should be put aside and that this was was the people's war, and the Ealing war films represented these new ideas. And it wasn't only the men who were fighting the war and 1943's The Gentle Sex

showed how a group of women were turned into defenders of the nation in the territorial army. Britain was at war and the cinema had no time to question what was going on, or stand back and consider the morality of war, there were battles to be won and on screen as in life we were going to get on with it. Images from article

AMERICANA

Oklahoma lawmaker wants to ban fetuses in food - Ricardo Lopez and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, latimesblogs.latimes.com: The legislation, known as SB 1418, is only a couple of paragraphs long. Introduced by Sen. Ralph Shortey (R), it states: "No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients."

Perhaps Newt's Obsession With The Moon Explains Callista's Hairdo? - Princess Sparkle Pony's Photoblog: "I've already written about how easy it is to mix up Callista


and

Callisto, Jupiter's fourth Galilean moon, but perhaps the resemblance between her hairdo and a spherical orb is intentional? Because Newt is really, really into the moon. It could explain the spherical nature of his own coiffure, come to think about it. He's just so INTO it! Maybe even the similarity of Callista's name to that of a moon's attracted him to her in the first place! Oh, I could go on and on." Images from entry

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