What is disturbing, though, on the face of it, was the lack of open transmission of the President’s own message to the Chinese people while he was in their country.  You can say that the Chinese leaders are determined to control their media environment, but to essentially shut down broadcasts of a U.S. President’s communication with students shows a real gap in understanding.  Even Gorbachev understood that an advanced society could not control communication if it wanted to make the most of its potential.  During the U.S. President’s visit at least, China stood to gain internationally by showing openness rather than its opposite.  What they did instead was unnecessary.

By the same token, Obama’s exaggerated bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito in Tokyo was also a misstep.

A Bow Too Low

In our digital age, images stay around, and this one will.  If Americans were feeling self-confident about their role in the world at this point in time, the bow would have been seen as an act of protocol, courtesy and even magnanimity.  In our current times of American insecurity, it will seen back home as weak.  Moreover, even Japanese found it inappropriate.

On the Road Again

An overseas trip by a U.S. president is always costly, logistically challenging, and full of colorful backdrops.  President Obama’s trip to Japan, Singapore, China and Korea is no exception.  If anything, there will be more excitement than usual, since it is his first trip to the region as President and there is still tremendous foreign public interest in this appealing, young, intelligent leader, his inspiring speeches, and his photogenic wife.

Why, then, is the mood so downbeat among the U.S. press corps — the “traveling press” — as they begin covering this trip?

The discouraging U.S. jobs reports with alarming unemployment rates provide part of the answer.  Another reason:  Obama’s narrow win in the House vote on health care last Saturday revealed his Democratic Party to be quite divided.  A respected poll showed the American public, never very warm toward Congress as an institution, now tending to favor Republicans over Democrats there.  Finally, the national tragedy of Ft. Hood, followed by an especially somber Veterans’ Day holiday, drove home the pressures on the U.S. military as it tries to cope with insurgent warfare in extremely complicated circumstances.

When the President returns home, there will be an announcement to make on Afghanistan strategy, while health care reform and regulation for Wall Street are debated.  More heavy lifting for a President reported to be losing weight.

Maybe, after all, this is a good time for the President to experience a change of scene — even if it will seem in Beijing like he’s on a visit to America’s banker.

Obama in the Classroom

Hopefully, the East Asian public will be drawn into the novelty of the visit and the “traveling press” of the American media will report on the public esteem that Obama enjoys abroad.

One thing you can bank on:  the White House will not be looking for photo ops in opulent surroundings.  American public diplomacy and White House politics are both best served by images of a hard-working and popular President seen focusing on the tough issues.  That part should not be difficult.

Nadia Bilbassy is a correspondent with MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Co.) and Joyce Karam is with London-based Arabic language daily Al Hayat.  MBC owns Al Jazeera.

Among their views, both complained that access to the Obama White House is not what you might think.  After granting his first interview upon taking office to Al-Arabiya, President Barack Obama has not been particularly available to the Middle Eastern press corps.

Further, after the brilliant success of Obama’s Cairo speech to the Muslim world, his team missed a major opportunity at the start of Ramadan.  In organizing a White House dinner commemorating the start of the Muslim holy month, a tradition begun by George W. Bush, the Obama White House failed to invite the ambassadors from most of the majority Muslim countries.  Yes, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey were on the guest list, but the rest of the Muslim world was left off.
“They invited the Israeli Ambassador, but left off many ambassadors from Muslim countries,” Bilbassy notes with exasperation.

This slip-up (and others like it) stand in contrast with Obama’s sensitive understanding of the “Arab street” and the Muslim world in general, according to Bilbassy and Karam.  Obama’s Cairo speech is generally acknowledged to have been a masterpiece of political mass communication and these two correspondents second that opinion.

“Every broadcaster in the Middle East, except Syrian TV, carried the speech,” says Karam.  “His message is getting out.  In fact, after the speech I had people coming up to me saying, ‘Can you believe he spoke for 45 minutes without using any notes?’  They didn’t know he was using a teleprompter!”

After Obama’s unsuccessful trip to Copenhagen last week on behalf of Chicago’s Olympic bid, there are those who see weaknesses in his decision-making and communications.  Chances are what is missing is a more seasoned staff to vet issues and to make sure he isn’t spreading himself too thin.

Media Magnet?

All good, you say.  America’s influence in setting the media/political/social agenda in far off countries is once again confirmed.

The truth is a bit more complicated.

Yes, the achievements of Barack Obama and his campaign staff in last year’s election can offer inspiration and ideas to political organizers around the globe.  But the problem is that the same skill set can be applied to manipulate public opinion while the real news is concealed or ignored.

Unless you set political trade craft upon a foundation of democracy and free expression, the media and political techniques being discussed — what Russians like to call “political technologies” — are at best irrelevant and, at worst, harmful.

Take this seaside conference for instance, which was billed as a “media festival” for experts in communication from the former Yugoslavia — in local parlance, “the region.”  Some 2,000 young specialists in marketing and advertising, lobbyists and new media experts, came together from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania.  Although there was plenty of technical discussion about Web strategies, social media, and marketing, there was a kind of political sterility to it, remarkable given the fact that the countries represented here were at war during the participants’ living memory.

Some say the best way to make progress is to agree to keep some topics “off limits” and rebuild personal relationships through politically neutral discussions.  Nikola Vrdoljak, a Croat responsible for getting “regional” participants to the festival, said the first time this was tried — one year ago — the head of Serbian television (RTS),  Aleksandar Tijanic, had a productive discussion with the head of Croatian television (HRT).  “This was a guy who was known as Milosevic’s Goebbels, so we figured that if the two of them could get along, we had a chance of growing a common media market — which is something we all need.”

Oct. 2008: Improvised anti-Editorial Device in Zagreb

Yet the same time these pragmatic discussions are taking place, the independent media in practically all the countries of the ex-Yugoslavia are under attack — literally.  A year ago, the publisher of one of Zagreb’s news weeklies was killed by a bomb placed in his car in the center of town.  Other Croatian journalists have been beaten, intimidated and fired for daring to speak out about corruption and graft.  Last month, a photographer in Montenegro was beaten up by a mayor and his son for taking a photo of the mayor’s illegally parked car.  The only evidence of this media dark side at the “festival” was provided by a leading young journalist, Hrvoje Appelt, who has produced a remarkable documentary exhibit and Web site cataloging attacks on journalists.  This exhibit occupied a much less obvious position near the registration desk for the festival.

The good news is that many of those in attendance went up to Appelt to congratulate him.  The bad news is that they did so quietly.  David Plouffe might do well to mention this in his talk in Zagreb.

The State Department’s public diplomacy performance is worth monitoring in particular because the Department has, under Hillary Clinton, once again set out goals for itself to become more involved in interacting with foreign publics, not just governments.  Clinton has also initiated a kind of strategic review of the Department’s policies and priorities, called a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. If public diplomacy emerges as a high priority, then practitioners at the Department may stand a better chance of getting the resources they need to do their jobs.

There’s more.  At least one fairly breathless account claims that Secretary Clinton has begun to carry out a “revolution” in the way that the State Department does business.  Clinton’s head of Policy Planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter, is quoted as saying that “our diplomats are going to need to have skills that are closer to community organizing than traditional reporting and analysis. New connecting technologies will be vital…”

I’m not sure that the Department needs community organizing skills so much as it needs to improve its communication skills.  This means above all knowing your audience, so that government, media and publics all get messages that are consistent in terms of their content but at the same time tailored to suit their needs and understandings.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen has been telling the Pentagon something similar, but also emphasizing the very key point that  “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”  He adds:

Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises. The most common questions that I get in Pakistan and Afghanistan are: “Will you really stay with us this time?” “Can we really count on you?” I tell them that we will and that they can, but when it comes to real trust in places such as these, I don’t believe we are even in Year Zero yet. There’s a very long way to go.

Consistent effort is required, not a revolution.  Public Diplomacy 101.

This week’s bombings by insurgents in Baghdad illustrate the point.  They yielded the highest civilian death toll since American forces withdrew to their bases.  According to reports, American and Iraqi military agree that the Iraqis are not yet up to the task of protecting their own civilian population, but the U.S.-Iraqi agreement on U.S. withdrawal was essential to the credibility of the al-Maliki government with its own people.  So the American forces stay on their bases.

America’s drone bombings in Pakistan — the latest just yesterday — represent another Hobson’s choice.  It seems clear that without them, Taliban and other anti-Islamabad forces would become stronger and be an even greater threat to this large, unruly, nuclear-weaponed state.  Indeed, the drones have decapitated at least part of the al-Qaeda leadership.  However, these very strikes diminish the government’s credibility with its own people, since they are seen as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.  When innocent civilians are killed, Pakistan claims the attacks are America’s idea.

America has been in this situation before and the end game is always messy.  Hamid Karsai probably won re-election yesterday in Afghanistan to a second five-year term, and while the fact of the election is excellent news, we should not interpret it as a sign of public enthusiasm.  Public opinion throughout southwest Asia is liable to choose local sovereignty (however insecure and unfree) over security achieved with outside help.  As for the American public, President Obama yesterday made the point that the money being spent on the military engagement in Southwest Asia would be enough to pay for his health reform plan:

…we’re talking about $100 billion a year — which is still a significant amount of money — but just to give you a sense of perspective, I mean, the amount of money that we’re spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is…$8 billion to $9 billion a month, right?  So for about the same cost per year as we’ve been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal — just to give you a sense of perspective.

Many in the audience probably thought this would be a better way to spend the money.

We all see the drawbacks in the way we currently report the news and the alarming demise of once-trusted media as well as their “newsmen.”  The New York Times reported today on the near-death agreement of journalists at the Boston Globe to accept wage cuts from its owner, The Times Company.  The NYT account called the Globe “venerable.”  Which news media truly deserve to be called “venerable” today?

If it is true that a country eventually gets the kind of government it deserves, then it is certainly the case that a democracy gets the kind of news media that its citizens want and support.  Murrow and CBS News lost battles with their network but the Murrow-Cronkite generation never retreated from its ideal that to do their job meant to gather the news and convey it, without artifice.  Somewhere along the line, as the media became more image-conscious and fast, we stopped demanding the content that “Uncle Walter” and his team provided.  What we are left with, too often, is image and celebrity, not substance and fact.  It is, sadly, our own doing.

It’s a tale of  two Posts  — Washington and Huffington.

A revolution is underway in the news media, one neatly illustrated by how these two competitive news gathering organizations — the Washington Post and Huffington Post — have themselves made news in recent days.  And, I’ll warn you, if you don’t already know, it’s the Washington Post that comes out looking bad.

The first instance came last week at President Obama’s first full-scale daytime press conference.  Normally, the senior wire service reporter asks the first question, and a major U.S. TV network asks the second.  However, this time, after answering a question from AP’s Jennifer Loven, Obama turned to Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney and called on him.  “Since we’re on Iran,” the President began, “I know Nico Pitney is here from Huffington Post….Nico, I know that you, and all across the Internet, we’ve been seeing a lot of reports coming directly out of Iran. I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet.  Do you have a question?”

Yes, I did, answers Pitney.  I want to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian, he adds.

Pitney then proceeded to ask a question on this topic and the President gave a fairly unsatisfying answer.  But the media hubbub that ensued challenged some long held assumptions.  First, did the President, through his Press Office, suggest the topic that the questioner might ask about?  If so, didn’t this violate journalistic ethics?

A remarkable and undignified televised exchange finally took place between the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Pitney and served to underline the competition between the struggling “old” media and the upstart “new” media.  While there was a valid complaint — that media reps should avoid even the appearance of collusion with the politicians they cover — at heart this was a sign of the waning influence of the Washington Post and the rising influence of the Huffington Post.

But that was nothing compared to what the Washington Post did this week.  Katherine Weymouth, the Washington Post’s new publisher, had the idea that her Post should organize exclusive “salons” where lobbyists, for a hefty price, could saddle up to Post reporters, government officials and other “select minds.”  The new medium that broke this story, Politico, now reports that Weymouth has retired this idea, after an “uproar” in the newsroom that occasioned official statements from WP editors that the nature of the proposed events “precluded” participation by Post journalists.

This should give pause to all those who analyze the media and their responsibilities.

For decades, many major news media — or media that were once major — have traded off their prestige as news gathering organizations to conduct lucrative sidelines, such as organizing conferences attended by politicians and policy makers.  The Economist is a good example.  A special division of their organization does nothing but organize conferences that participants pay thousands of dollars to attend.  Occasionally some news is made which The Economist is well positioned to report first.  A little murky, perhaps.

Publishers and owners of major media also entertain society’s movers and shakers.  At such soirees, discussion is understood to be off the record, and usually there are professional boundaries observed.

But when the two ideas are combined to yield a “pay for access” situation, the proper separation of journalism and officialdom is removed, and we are all the worse off for it.  This is bad news for all of us who depend on media trying to be objective.

Politico’s Ted Johnson notes that “even the most unlikely of appointees can make their mark.”  However, the patronage game of appointments as reward for campaign contributions makes the odds of this happening rather long.  Wealthy campaign contributors seldom have input into policy issues during the campaign — their expertise lies elsewhere.  Patronage turns out to be the likely course, one followed by every administration, Republican and Democratic, and the transparent reason for many otherwise inexplicable choices.

Johnson quotes Bruce Gelb, George H.W. Bush’s chief fundraiser, as pleading that fundraisers deserve more respect — they are “committed, dedicated, usually bright, successful people.”  But Gelb’s own tenure as 41’s director of USIA was so lackluster that it undercuts his argument.  The more that appointments are influenced by the amount of money that one has raised, the more that appointee’s credibility suffers.

What made it so?  Unlike other speeches by traveling U.S. presidents, this one tried to reset world politics in a fundamental way, even as it introduced its themes protesting that “no single speech can overcome years of mistrust.”  David Gergen, communications advisor to Reagan and Bill Clinton, was clearly in awe of Obama’s ambition:  he told CNN beforehand it was a “Mt. Everest of a speech” in terms of how much it was trying to accomplish.

Will it change hearts and minds in predominantly Muslim countries?  I think it at least will create conditions for a new beginning in America’s relations with the Islamic world.  Obama spoke knowledgeably about Islam, about Muslims in America and about America’s ties with the Muslim countries.

Obama’s obvious personal connection to Islam — his father’s family, his childhood years in Indonesia — added credibility to Obama’s call for tolerance and dialogue.  The list of issues presented (at times, more like a professor than a politician) did not neglect any of the political-social realities:  violent extremism, Palestine and Israel, nuclear non-proliferation, democracy and human rights, religious freedom, women’s rights.

Broader engagement between the United States and the Muslim world.  Not just oil and gas.  This could indeed be a new beginning.