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Uninformed population means harmful foreign policies can go unaccountable

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Many US policies, especially foreign policies, have come under much sharp criticism from around the world as well as from various segements within American society. As a result, some fear that they are running the risk of alienating themselves from the rest of the world. A revealing quote hints that media portrayal of issues can affect the constructive criticism of American foreign policy:

"One reads about the world's desire for American leadership only in the United States", one anonymous well-placed British diplomat recently observed, "Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism."

- Jonathan Power, America is in Danger of Alienating the World, March 3, 1999

The quote above also summarizes how America is viewed in the international community and how some of their actions are portrayed in the United States. Yet, the international community, often for very valid reasons, sees America's actions differently.

A year after the war on Iraq had started, March 2004 saw a large poll released by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (GAP) from the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press. Polls are usually fraught with problems, but this one was interesting because it looked at views in a number of countries, including some in western Europe, and some in Muslim countries, and found in all of them a growing mistrust of the United States, particularly President George Bush. On many issues there was a wide gap between respondents in the U.S. versus respondents elsewhere, including key ally, Britain. And as the diplomat noted above in 1999, this poll also noted that 61 to 84% of respondents in other countries found the U.S. motives in foreign policy to be self-interested, while 70% of respondents in the United States thought their country did take other's views into account. This divide in perceptions is large to say the least. But why is there such a gap?

Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science describes one of her previous jobs as being a "propagandist" for the U.S. Information Agency. In an interview, she also describes how Americans and the rest of the world often view the American media:

[P]ublic diplomacy is a euphemism for propaganda. In the United States, we don't think of ourselves as a country that propagandizes, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation in terms of our advertising, in terms of our global reach, our public relations industry - we have more public relations professionals and consultants in the United States than we do news reporters. So there's an entire history of advertising, promoting, and getting across the message of America both within and also outside of the United States.

- Dr. Nancy Snow, Propaganda Inc.: Behind the curtain at the U.S.I.A., an Interview with Guerilla News Network

Australian journalist John Pilger also captures this very well:

Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?"

- John Pilger, In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US power, 20 February, 2001

While many countries - if not all - in some way suppress/distort information to some degree, the fact that a country as influential in the international arena such as the United States is also doing it is very disturbing. The people of this nation are the ones that can help shape the policies of the most powerful nation, thereby affecting many events around the world. For that to happen, they need to be able to receive objective reporting.

An integral part of a functioning democracy is that people are able to make informed choices and decisions. However, as the 2000 Election testified, there has been much amiss with the media coverage and discourse in general.

The inappropriate fit between the country's major media and the country's political system has starved voters of relevant information, leaving them at the mercy of paid political propaganda that is close to meaningless and often worse. It has eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who are governed give not only their consent but their informed consent.

- Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p. 192.

(Note that in the above quote, the book was originally published in 1983, but is still relevant to today and applicable to the 2000 Elections in the United States and the various controversies that accompanied it.)

 



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