LONDON — Nowadays, advertising reaches into practically every corner of the globe, but nowhere is it such a defining feature of the national culture as in the United States. America was, after, all the forcing-house of this meretricious medium, which along with Hollywood has done so much to mold American consciousness and fix the image of the United States in the eyes of mankind.
The faith of the US power elite in what can be achieved by advertising and the public relations industry can seem positively religious. The distinction between state propaganda and commercial advertising having long since grown blurred, American politicians routinely think in terms of selling themselves, their policies and their country.
In their timely and illuminating new book, “Weapons of Mass Deception: the Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq”, the American media analysts Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber describe how US Secretary of State Colin Powell, anxious to enhance America’s standing in the Muslim world, recruited the services of the leading advertising executive, Charlotte Beers. Powell’s aim was to “re-brand” US foreign policy and he was convinced that this celebrated specialist in “brand management” was the ideal person to take on the “America account”.
It impressed him that Beers had been promoting a certain brand of shampoo to great effect. What recommended her to him above all, however, was the impact she had made on his own shopping habits. “Guess what,” the secretary of state enthused. “She got ME to buy Uncle Ben’s Rice”. That there might be anything unseemly about marketing your native land as if it were just another product on a supermarket shelf does not appear to have crossed Colin Powell’s mind.
Charged with winning Muslim hearts and minds, Beers set to work with missionary zeal. As America began bombing Afghanistan in the closing months of 2001, she considered recruiting sports celebrities like Muhammad Ali and the basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon, US Muslims who could be expected to impart to Muslims everywhere a sense of America’s status as an “elegant brand”.
At the same time, she organized a “feel-good” PR campaign entitled “Muslim Life in America,” which depicted, via a website and color brochures in multiple languages, the tolerance and respect purportedly enjoyed by Muslims in the United States.
Much was made of the hospitality of US President George W. Bush and US ambassadors in the Middle East and Asia, of their readiness to welcome Muslims into their own homes in order to mark iftar. The aim was to demonstrate that American takes Muslim holidays every bit as seriously as Christian and Jewish holidays and that, far from being the Great Satan, the United States was generous and good.
Beers, though, was facing a major problem: How, against the background of the US aggression in Afghanistan, to quell Muslim suspicions that America was now waging deliberate war against Islam itself. Undaunted, she launched a fresh “Dialogue with Islam” campaign, flying to Cairo to promote it in person. But her efforts proved fruitless, and she left her Egyptian hosts with the impression that she had no real understanding of the extent to which America was seen by Muslims as a bullying superpower, or of Muslim outrage about US double standards over Palestine.
Imperceptive though she may have been, however, Beers was at least quick to grasp that her message was falling on deaf ears, for the opinion polls by which publicists like her set such store indicated unmistakably that most Muslims continued to view the US in negative terms. Even in Kuwait, a country liberated by the US in 1991, only 28 percent of the population professed pro-American sympathies.
With what was perhaps growing desperation, Beers lobbied the US Congress for a budget of $595 million to “improve and magnify the ways in which we are addressing the people of the world.” Much of this money was to be spent on “listening activities,” on ever more polling of Muslim opinion in and outside the US. Meanwhile, she launched new PR initiatives galore, notably her $5 million “Shared Values” campaign, dubbed by The New York Times as “Muslim-as-Apple-Pie”. The campaign featured a head scarf-wearing Lebanese-born school teacher in Ohio who appeared with smiling children in her all-American kitchen, blithely insisting that she had witnessed no anti-Muslim prejudice whatsoever in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
Yet, despite the vast sums of money lavished on her numerous schemes, it was daily more apparent that Beers was signally failing to achieve the objectives for which Colin Powell had signed her up. Indeed, there was simply no disguising the fact that America’s reputation throughout the Muslim world was nose-diving.
Less than a month after the launching of the “Shared Values” campaign, the State Department abruptly terminated it, and in March 2002, just two weeks before the US invasion of Iraq, this acclaimed advertising guru — for what were said to be health reasons — resigned.
It clearly never occurred to Charlotte Beers and her Washington sponsors that the product they were so eager to promote, US foreign policy, could itself be problematic. The saga of Beers and the “America account” testifies to the unshakable US conviction that if your target market is unreceptive to your merchandise, the explanation lies not in the nature of the merchandise but in its insufficiently seductive presentation.
That Muslim opinion, along with the opinion of the world at large, is principally influenced not by what the US says but by what it does might seem self-evident, yet it is far from manifest to the likes of Charlotte Beers and Colin Powell. Still, if George W. Bush and his colleagues, with their boundless propagandist resources, cannot persuade Muslims of America’s goodwill, they have been all too successful in exploiting the fear and vulnerability felt by their own people in the wake of Sept. 11.
Much of Weapons of Mass Deception is taken up with chronicling the efforts of furiously partisan broadcasters to sell the war against Iraq to the American public by whipping up hyperpatriotism, stifling dissent and diffusing prodigious quantities of disinformation.
It is a thoroughly unedifying story, one in which what Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber call the “patriotism police”, the bellicose television and radio personalities who have insidiously linked Sept. 11 with Saddam Hussein, figure large.
It speaks ill for American “democracy” that while the “patriotism police” have enjoyed endless opportunities to vilify critics of the war, American peace groups hoping to broadcast anti-war ads were flatly refused air-time by all the major networks, including MTV.
Research has revealed that during the Gulf War of 1991, the more television Americans watched, the less they actually knew about what was going on; they cannot be said to have been any better served by the American communications industry during the latest US intervention in the Middle East; indeed, thanks not least to the emergence of Rupert Murdoch’s warmongering, xenophobic, raucously illiberal Fox TV station, the forces dedicated to hoodwinking and misleading the American populace have been hugely strengthened.
Weapons of Mass Deception evokes a pathologically ethnocentric culture, a nation that often seems incapable of relating to the rest of the world except through movie images and self-serving marketing strategies. Nevertheless, the very existence of such a book is a reminder that there are other American voices besides those of the current US president and his cheerleaders. Nor are those voices bound to go forever unheeded.
Rampton and Stauber’s claim that Americans have been bamboozled into backing the wrong war against the wrong enemy in the wrong place may well chime with increasing public unease about the US occupation of Iraq. Bush, meanwhile, could be about to discover that, in the famous words of Abraham Lincoln, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time — not even when you have at your disposal the most concerted media manipulation money can buy.
— Neil Berry is a London-based freelance journalist and the author of “Articles of Faith: A History of British Intellectual Journalism” (2002).
- Arab News Opinion 7 September 2003
