A Sinister Equation

Following the Wikileaks Watergate there has been an increased concern over the Internet, its political and social effects, and its potentiality in damaging states’ image.
Therefore, as it has been highlighted during last seminar, there is an increased will to regulate this media at the international level. It seems that there has been a proposal to put it under international regulations. This is also the result of China’s and other countries success in restricting the access to the Internet for their own people.
Today I came across an interesting news, that made me link this apparently good will to matters of power politics.
The Italian online newspaper Peace Reporter published on the 4th of March an article that highlights that the US is concerned over that fact that it is loosing the information war vis-à-vis Russian, Chinese and Arabs media. The USA is worried that its monopoly over the international media has been eroded and that these alternative sources of information undermine US image, as they do not portray America as the US public diplomacy does.
With this preoccupation in mind, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has proposed new funding for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (Bbg), an organization responsible for all non-military media sponsored by the US government, which controls, among others, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and Radio Martì.
The aim of this new funding is to allow the Bbg, and I translate the quote, “to promote and sustain liberty and democracy spreading accurate and objective information about the US and the world“.
Once again we face the idea that the US model is the best one and the fittest for all the world. However do we really want the US model of liberty and democracy?
Just to make an instance of how democratic the US is, there the media, neuralgic centre of a well functioning democracy, is completely in the hands of media-kings such as Rupert Murdock, they fight for audience and advertisement and infotainment is the rule rather than exception. Not to mention the “democratic” Iraq war, or the social inequality.
Coming back to the Bbg, Peace Reporter notes that the Washington Post has highlighted the necessity that the Bbg has to work “on a daily basis in order to allow its radio, internet and television networks to reach the public in those countries where they are blocked, damaged or outlawed”.
There we go the equation is completed now. The US feels that it is loosing the information war vis-à-vis the new Russian, Chinese and Arab media; its governmental information cannot reach the public in countries where the internet is restricted, so diminishing the number of people that it can influence (or manipulate, according to your perception of the US); therefore it is putting forward discourses of democracy and liberty in order to push to open up the media in those countries that limit them, thus enhancing its possibility to regain terrain in the information war.
Here the old question that everybody keeps on asking re-emerges: is public diplomacy mere propaganda? Is it just an embellished word for a concept that is unthinkable in democratic societies? Will America ever learn from its past?
I am absolutely impressed how the “mamma” of democracy, as the USA is often referred to, can transform such a valuable discourses as democracy and liberty, in a mere tool to pursue its interests at the international level.
Will the USA, and the followers countries, learn that democracy is not made by words but by deeds? Saying that a country is a democratic one does not make it such, democracy is not a “speech act”, democracy must be a concrete, palpable form of government, not a poltergeist that never materializes.





http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jun/30/internet-freedom-of-information for countries restricting internet contents concerning politics.

http://it.peacereporter.net/articolo/27200/Usa%2C+la+nuova+propaganda for the article published by Peace Reporter. (Please contact me if you want the some more translation of this article)