Follow-up interview and analysis by Fred Kaplan, Slate magazine, 30 May 2007

To turn a famous Hollywood movie quote on its head: What we don't have here is a failure to communicate.

Since 9-11, the State Department has undertaken an unprecedented effort to reach audiences both in the U.S. and overseas to explain our foreign policy objectives. My former office there arranged more than 6,500 interviews in the past six years, about half of those with international media. On any given day, senior department officials, including the secretary of state, were doing four or five interviews.

Yet during this time, poll after poll showed an alarming trajectory of increased animosity toward America and this administration in particular, both here and abroad.

This contradiction -- reaching a larger audience than ever before to explain our foreign policy goals and objectives, while the support for those policies fell -- underscores the gap between how our actions have been perceived and how we want them to be perceived.

We have eroded not only the good will of the post-9-11 days but also any residual appreciation from the countries we supported during the Cold War. This is due to several actions taken by the Bush administration, including pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (environment), refusing to take part in the International Criminal Court (rule of law), and pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (arms control). The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and the continuing controversy over the detainees in Guantanamo also sullied the image of America.

Collectively, these actions have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. That is the policy we have been "selling" through our actions, which speak the loudest of all.

As the director of media affairs at State, this is the conundrum that I faced every day. I tried through the traditional domestic media and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media -- Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat -- to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words....

Full text is available from the Star-Telegram's Web site.

Price Floyd was director of media affairs for the State Department until several weeks ago and is now the director of external relations at the Center for a New American Security.

Bush's Failed Campaign To Rebrand America

Fred Kaplan, 30 May 2007 (excerpts)

... In a phone interview today, Floyd--who is now director of external relations at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank--elaborated on what led him to abandon his career at the State Department, the only place he'd ever wanted to work.

"I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," he recalled. "They'd say, 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say, 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.' "

He recounted a phone conversation with a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad who wanted Floyd and his colleagues to sell the media more "good-news stories" about the war in Iraq. "I said, 'Fine, tell me a good-news story, I want good-news stories, too.' There was a silence on the other end of the line," he recalled. "It was like you could hear crickets chirping."

Floyd would tell his colleagues that the administration's message was drifting dangerously out of synch with reality. He was finding it increasingly difficult to place officials' op-ed pieces in serious newspapers. Few broadcast media, other than Christian radio networks, wanted to interview the department's experts, dismissing what they had to say as "more blah-blah from the State Department."

After a few recitations of these warnings, his bosses, as he put it, "started telling me to shut up. They didn't want to hear this."

The problem, of course, went--and still goes--well beyond the State Department bureaucracy. Ever since 9/11, President Bush and his top aides have acted as if they needed only to "rebrand" America--devise a slogan or set of images--in order to clear up hostile foreigners' misunderstandings about our nature and intentions....

One crucial aspect of this problem antedates George W. Bush's presidency. It goes back to the mid-1990s, when Jesse Helms, then the xenophobic Republican chairman of the Senate foreign-relations committee, gutted the U.S. Information Agency and swept its tattered remnants into a dark, dank corner of the State Department.

In its Cold War heyday, the USIA had been a fairly independent agency mandated with blaring the principles of American culture and democracy across the world. It sponsored jazz concerts and radio broadcasts, speaking tours, public libraries filled with classic political documents. The operation was so independent from policy-makers that, during the 1960s and early '70s, some American scholars sent out on USIA-sponsored speaking tours openly opposed the Vietnam War.

The agency's relative independence--and its staff's attunement to foreign cultures and languages--conveyed an attractive image of America. But it was also what annoyed Sen. Helms, and so he dismantled the whole operation....

Full text is available from Slate.com.