US Propaganda for Foreign Audiences

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2005

While U.S. propaganda for foreign audiences is nothing new, questions of how to promote U.S. policy and polish the U.S. image persist. Radio Sawa, a U.S. supported radio channel broadcast in the Middle East, combines Arabic and Western pop music with news written by Voice of America staff. "It’s tough to independently assess Sawa content from afar, but program summaries and interview transcripts from the State Department help," the Columbia Journalism Review's Corey Pein writes. "Sometimes, the questions asked by Sawa correspondents are more revealing than the answers:

• "Can you please state what is our stated policy towards the fence that the Israelis are building right now?
• "What is the U.S. going to do, in order to swipe away this illusion and this fear of the Arabs and the Iraqis of something called the 'U.S. occupation,' which is not really what the U.S. is doing in Iraq?

"Iraqis accustomed to road checkpoints and house-by-house raids may not easily be convinced that they are living through an 'illusion' of occupation. And whatever 'our' policy is, 'fence' is a loaded term for the concrete wall snaking through Israel and Palestine," Pein writes.