familial connection between public diplomacy and public relations in a speech he gave to the Public Relations Society of America:
I know that I am among friends this morning. For the U.S. Information Agency and the Public Relations Society, like the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady, are sisters under the skin. We both work for others––you for clients and firms; my Agency for 180 million Americans. We both are in the business of persuasion––
for you, the American public; for us, peoples everywhere abroad.
Murrow’s kindred spirit is evident in those words, but the purpose of this chapter is to offer a more critical communications dimension to the in-tegration of public relations with public diplomacy as proposed by the inte-grated model of public diplomacy. Two fundamental questions are addressed:
Is public relations closely allied to public diplomacy? And if so, is the field of public relations in need of its own makeover in both public perception and media framing?
Public diplomacy, whose purpose may not be completely understood by the lay public, does not suffer the same source credibility problems as does public relations (e.g., Stauber & Rampton, 1995; Callison, 2001; Nation-al Credibility Index, 1999). Of the two disciplines examined in this book, public relations suffers more from a persistent image problem while public diplomacy suffers more from a persistent funding problem (e.g., Murrow, 1961; Coombs, 1964; Duffey, 1995; Callison, 2004; Defense Science Board, 2004, O’Brien, 2005; GAO, 2006). This suggests that the integration of public diplomacy and public relations is not yet on solid footing. There is a greater need “that public relations needs more public relations” (L’Etang, 1997, p. 34) than there is a need for public diplomacy to need more public diplomacy, at least from a credibility stance. Nevertheless, public diplomacy has been widely examined from the perspective of theorists and practitioners in public relations (Galboa, 2008; Signitzer and Coombs, 1992; Signitzer and Wasmer, 2006), and the more modern interpretations of two-way sym-metrical approaches to public relations (Grunig, 1993; Grunig, 2001) reflect the relationship-driven rethinking in public diplomacy strategies that have greatly evolved from the more self-serving, self-preservation approaches of press agentry and public information (Snow, 2009).
To be sure, American public diplomacy and public relations uniquely dif-fer in their semantic and reputational contexts than public diplomacy and public relations campaigns in other countries. An Austrian immigrant to the United States wrote the first public relations texts (Bernays, 1928, 1929) and the involvement of eminent political communication scholars (Lasswell, 1927; Lippmann, 1922) in World War I and World War II advanced the
study and application of public relations to national conflict outcomes, there-in settthere-ing the historical foundation for a future there-integration of public relations with public diplomacy campaigns. While there are some studies (Johnson, 2005) that show a natural evolution from one-way directional propaganda approaches to strategic communication with other countries’ own public rela-tions in the United States, this chapter is focused exclusively on the relational ties between U.S.-based persuasion initiatives in public diplomacy, tradition-ally a foreign affairs strategy in the public domain, and public relations, tradi-tionally a non-governmental strategy in the private sector.
In a U.S. context, there has been a long history of promoting the con-cepts of truth and openness as they relate to organizational credibility, es-pecially during the Cold War era (1945–1991). Before his appointment as director of the United States Information Agency, former CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the aims of the public diplomacy agency he was about to lead were simple:
We shall operate on the basis of truth. Being convinced that we are engaged in hot and implacable competition with communist forces around the world, we will not be content to counter their lies and distortions. We shall constantly reit-erate our faith in freedom. (Whitton, 1963, p. 5)
In May 1963 when Murrow was requesting additional appropriations for the U.S. Information Agency, he reinforced to members of Congress that U.S. credibility in the world was directly linked to truth and transparency since they stood in contrast to the ideology and praxis of the Soviet Union:
American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst.
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that. (Snow, 2013)
In today’s post-September 11 environment where public diplomacy is featured prominently in information and image war contests, problems of American credibility remain, especially as they relate to the public perceptions of public relations practitioners. Callison (2004) notes that public relations problems stem not from the organizational management level but from the practitioner level. When labeled as public relations specialists or company spokespersons in news stories, practitioners are often perceived as holding vested interests in preserving the reputation of their client companies, which leads to a “perceived reporting bias” that causes doubt in the minds of the reader on questions of credibility and trustworthiness. As Callison explained:
With all text held constant across message condition other than identification of the information source as either a public relations specialist or a more nondescript
company spokesperson, analyses revealed that participants were much more criti-cal of the public relations source and the organization employing the source than his or her unlabeled counterpart and accompanying organization. More precise-ly, the public relations source was perceived as less likely to be telling the truth, more dishonest, and less trustworthy (p. 372).
In an effort to devise an answer to these questions of relational parallels between public diplomacy and public relations, this chapter analyzes the way public relations has been framed in the debate and discourse of failures of U.S. public diplomacy since 9/11. Such writings have often centered their criticism on the failure of strategies to persuade through attempts to “sell” a positive image of the United States to the rest of the world. This selling strat-egy, a failure to “tell” America’s story to the world (USIA’s motto) in favor of selling or hyping a positive image of America (Snow, 2010), is presented as a one-way asymmetrical public relations approach, which leaves out an en-tire discourse and debate on public relations strategies that may prove useful to a more complete public diplomacy toolbox. The often overlooked public relations strategies, those which could help explain, clarify and possibly im-prove the image of public relations within the public diplomacy community, include two-way symmetrical communication strategies, relationship building and influence models, all of which will be presented as cases where strategic communications efforts prevail over antiquated one-way asymmetrical public relations campaigns.
The possibility for a smoother integration of public relations and public diplomacy may rest with a critical assessment of the context, merits or ends to which these communicative practices are applied (e.g., Snow, 2009; Weaver et al., 2004, p. 2). The twain between the two fields of PR (public relations) and PD (public diplomacy) may meet on firmer ground if one rejects the strongly held belief that propaganda always operates counter to the public interest while public relations necessarily works for the public interest. One may have to recognize, as pointed out by Weaver et al. (2004) that since “Ed-ward Bernays first introduced the term ‘public relations counsel’ in his 1923 publication, Crystallizing Public Opinion, public relations, although widely practiced by corporations and governments alike, has monumentally failed to establish itself of positive utility and benefit” (p. 2). To make these distant cousins more aligned, public relations may need more PR to increase the public’s understanding of its role and function in society.
Certainly public relations is a tool for social and political power in some hands, but can also become a tool for those who seek to challenge such power. Two-way symmetrical communication in public relations theory and
practice—which includes public opinion research mixed with engagement in stakeholder dialogue to establish organizational objectives—suggests a dis-tinction for public relations from propaganda. Given the explosive growth in the public relations profession (from 1992–2001 the industry grew by 220% and revenues at the top 50 firms grew by 12%) and the popularity of public relations study in university communication programs where it is becoming one of the fastest-growing majors, there is no question that the influence and involvement of public relations in public diplomacy strategies will increase (Wang, 2004). Wang cites Ketchum Public Relations chairman, David Drobis, who has said that relationship building is the public relations profession.
There is no question that public relations’ cousin in the post-9/11 envi-ronment is public diplomacy. The question remains whether or not this is a naturally close relationship or one derived from external crisis circumstances that gave rise to such integration. After September 11, 2001, when outside terrorists attacked U.S. financial and military centers, the U.S. government immersed itself in a global information war to promote the interests, values, and image of the United States. Not since the Cold War had the government so engaged its persuasion industries (advertising, public relations) to combat stereotypes, target enemy populations, and single out particular regions like the Middle East for widespread broadcast information campaigns to over-come negative perceptions and attitudes toward the United States. Within the matrix of this new information war campaign, a number of terms were resurrected to describe the U.S. effort, most notably propaganda, public re-lations, and public diplomacy. Public relations received a universal definition almost forty years ago when a group of sixty-five public relations leaders took 472 definitions and came up with an eighty-eight-word sentence to describe what they do:
Public relations is a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communications, understanding, acceptance, and co-operation between an organization and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and sound and ethical communication techniques as its principal tools (Harlow, 1976, 36).
Similarly, in 1980, the Public Relations Society of America came up with two short definitions that have remained popular to this day: “Public rela-tions helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other” and
“Public relations is an organization’s efforts to win cooperation of groups of people” (Seitel, 2001).
Embedded in the longer and shorter definitions of public relations is an emphasis on process, mutuality, and building credibility (e.g., Grunig, 1993, 2001; Signitzer and Coombs, 1992), all of which overlap with the goals and strategies of public diplomacy managers involved in the information wars since 9/11. The challenge is that to many laypersons public relations amounts at times to nothing more than “spin,” where words, facts, and images are twist-ed in order to better the outcome of the client; a public diplomacy campaign to the Middle East may suffer the same characterization—as really nothing more than propaganda with a happy face. This may explain why public rela-tions officials denounce the characterization of what they do as spinmeister-ing, while public diplomacy officials tend to eschew the word “propaganda”
as a euphemism for what they do. Outside the United States, these delinea-tions and defenses are not always accepted. In many circles, public reladelinea-tions, advertising, and marketing are used interchangeably with propaganda and do not carry the same negative, false assumptions.
How is what public relations professionals do that much different from the international persuasion campaigns we call public diplomacy?
The difference may be just semantic, over which scholars and practitioners continue to debate. Former United States Information Agency (USIA)/
WorldNet TV Service Director Alvin Snyder said that during the Cold War
“the U.S. government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined,” and “the biggest branch of this propaganda machine is called the United States Information Agency” (1995, xi). What Snyder identified as propaganda then is preferably referred to today as public di-plomacy, defined by USIA’s successors at the U.S. State Department as that which “seeks to promote the national interest and the national secu-rity of the United States through understanding, informing, and influenc-ing foreign publics and broadeninfluenc-ing dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad” (USIAAA, 2002). The U.S. State Department has an under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public affairs, with former advertising executive Charlotte Beers serving in that position from just after 9/11 until the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003.
Like the term propaganda’s tenuous tie to public diplomacy, the public relations industry continues to carry negative associations whenever it is as-sociated only with one-way asymmetrical communication such as a publicist who generates favorable publicity and flacks for one’s client. A case in point is
the testimony of Joseph Duffey, who served as the final director of the USIA before its integration into the State Department. He told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that American public diplomacy must always be distinguished from American public relations:
Let me just say a word about public diplomacy. It is not public relations. It is not flacking for a Government agency or even flacking for America. It is trying to relate beyond government-to-government relationships the private institu-tions, the individuals, the long-term contacts, the accurate understanding, the full range of perceptions of America to the rest of the world, both to those who are friendly or inclined to be our partners or allies from one issue to another to those who are hostile, with some credibility or impartiality (Duffey, 1995).
What Joseph Duffey was describing is an ongoing definitional problem for public diplomacy in the twenty-first century: it is often defined, rightly or wrongly, in terms of what it is not. This volume is likely to help to overcome the difficulty that agency directors like Duffey have had in their understand-ing of what it is that public relations professionals and public diplomacy man-agers do in real world contexts and how often their communicative practices overlap.
What does distinguish public diplomacy from public relations is that while public relations is still primarily linked to corporate communications and business management models, public diplomacy theory and practice are linked to foreign affairs and the national interest. It sits squarely in the midst of national security objectives and promoting national security interests.
Generally accepted definitions of public diplomacy include the following:
(1) Public diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest of the United States through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences;
and (2) Public diplomacy is as important to the national interest as military preparedness (Wallin, 2012).
The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act, is one of the linchpins of U.S. public diplo-macy. It has two-way communication strategies in its language:
The objectives of this Act are to enable the Government of the United States to correct the misunderstandings about the United States in other countries, which constituted obstacles to peace, and to promote mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries, which is one of the essential foundations of peace.
One of its authors, Karl Mundt, clearly viewed the act more as a one-way in-formational counterpropaganda to Soviet propaganda. He wrote:
Immediately following the close of World War II when we realized that we were leaving a hot war only to enter a cold war, many of us recognized the importance of fashioning programs to meet effectively the non-military challenge confront-ing us. It was out of this era that the Smith-Mundt Act emerged. These Cold War weapons of words were needed because the United States faced “an alien force which seeks our total destruction” (Mundt, quoted in Glander, 2000, 61).
The other U.S. public diplomacy linchpin, the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, incorporated provisions of Senator J. William Fulbright’s amendment in 1946 and the Smith-Mundt Act to establish a new educational and cultural exchange policy to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange; to strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world. (Smith-Mundt Act, quoted in Snow, 1998, 619) This view of mutual understanding and mutuality in public diplomacy would likely emphasize very different approaches and measures of effectiveness than one placing public diplomacy squarely in the midst of a national crisis.
Over the last fifty years, no single consensus has emerged to define the direction of U.S. public diplomacy aside from the goals and whims of the incumbent executive branch of the U.S. government. As Michael Holtzman (2003) observed in The New York Times:
United States public diplomacy is neither public nor diplomatic. First, the gov-ernment—not the broader American public—has been the main messenger to a world that is mightily suspicious of it. Further, the State Department, which oversees most efforts, seems to view public diplomacy not as a dialogue but as a one-sided exercise…America speaking to the world.
Holtzman’s criticism reflects that same criticism surrounding the public relations school that says the best public relations is the least visible. Holtz-man asserts that U.S. public diplomacy has failed because it has not adhered to the school of thought advanced at by both Senator J. William Fulbright and Edward R. Murrow. What I have referred to as both “rethinking pub-lic diplomacy” and “pubpub-lic diplomacy as if pubpub-lics mattered,” (Snow, 2006, 2009, 2010) suggests a far wider array of participants, practitioners, and per-spectives than just those seen or heard in the armed forces or Foreign Service
or inside the Washington beltway. As Murrow himself defined the field fifty years ago when serving as director of the USIA in 1963:
Public diplomacy differs from traditional diplomacy in that it involves interaction not only with governments but primarily with non-governmental individuals and organizations. Furthermore, public diplomacy activities often present many dif-fering views represented by private American individuals and organizations in addition to official government views.
Murrow’s definition suggests that public diplomacy in practice is as much at home in corporate boardrooms, pop concerts, and peace rallies as it is inside the halls of Congress. Nevertheless, U.S. public diplomacy today is still often assumed to be linked with traditional diplomatic goals of national govern-ments. As Christopher Ross, former U.S. State Department special coordina-tor for public diplomacy and public affairs, writes:
The practitioners of traditional diplomacy engage the representatives of foreign governments in order to advance the national interests articulated in their own government’s strategic goals in international affairs. Public diplomacy, by con-trast, engages carefully targeted sectors of foreign publics in order to develop support for those same strategic goals (2002, 75).
Whenever public diplomacy definitions are overtly linked to official out-comes of national governments (e.g., in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror), this tends to connote a more negative interpretation linked to propa-ganda outcomes. In December 2004, the U.S.-based science and technology firm Battelle released a list of the top ten innovations for the war on terror.
One innovation forecast to emerge in the following decade (2005–2014) was twenty-first-century public diplomacy that requires nontechnical skills development in intercultural communication and advanced strategic commu-nication. Battelle’s team of experts included retired generals from the U.S.
Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps as well as Ohio State University faculty.
The team linked public diplomacy innovations directly to the U.S.-led War on Terror as well as modern public relations:
The war against terrorism is, in part, a war with extremists whose culture, world view, and values conflict with those of the West. There are economic, religious, political, and ideological tensions between the Middle East and the West. As such, any discussion of tools for combating terrorism must include deploying mass communication to break down these barriers. The first step will be gaining a fuller understanding of opposing cultures and values so that the United States and its allies can develop more effective strategies to prevent terrorism. America needs to project a more balanced image of Western culture through strategic, positive communication. This could be achieved by communicating the Western message through targeted use of mass media, developing a next-generation Voice
of America approach, perhaps supported with distribution of inexpensive, dispos-able TVs. (Battelle, 2004)
While acknowledging the obvious strains in policy and projected images between the Middle East and the West, this definition of twenty-first-century public diplomacy offers primarily an asymmetric information model of public relations that seeks to break down barriers in the Middle East to a Western worldview, message, and values. Western tension with the Middle East is caus-ally linked to combating terrorism and overcoming oppositional cultures and values, but not linked to specific foreign policy disagreements with the Unit-ed States. Gaining understanding of another culture is concernUnit-ed primarily with comprehension in order to combat terrorism, not with building mutual understanding that may improve the foreign relations of the United States, its people, and its government with other nations and peoples.
The Battelle definition of twenty-first-century public diplomacy is an ac-cepted dimension of public diplomacy, one identified in U.S. history as the tough-minded, Cold War–centric government information model whereby public diplomacy is defined as “the way in which both government and pri-vate individuals and groups influence directly or indirectly those public at-titudes and opinions which bear directly on another government’s foreign policy decisions” (Signitzer & Coombs, 1992, 138). The Battelle version be-longs to the political information side of public diplomacy that advocates the U.S. case in particular and the Western civilization model in general. Within this school of thought, it is most important that international publics gain a better understanding of the United States and its culture, values, and institu-tions, primarily for securing U.S. foreign policy ends and defending national security objectives.
The best public diplomacy, like the best public relations, uses multifacet-ed approaches to global communication, including an intercultural commu-nication dimension of public diplomacy identified earlier, to foster “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries” as advocated in the Fulbright-Hays Act. In this framework, cultural comprehension is also sought, but not primarily for unilateral advan-tage and outcome (which by definition stresses fast media such as radio and television). Rather, long-term strategies for mutual benefit and mutual trust are emphasized, including slower media such as films, exhibitions, and educa-tional and cultural exchanges (e.g., Fulbright scholars, Internaeduca-tional Visitors Leadership Program).
As noted earlier, both public relations and public diplomacy can and do emphasize relationship-building practices. It very much depends on the in-tended outcome of the information campaign whether or not the relationship