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Shared Values Revisited
by Sheldon Rampton
 I received a request recently from a university professor who teaches a course about media literacy.
She was wondering if I could help her find videos of the "Shared Values" television ads that the U.S. Department of State produced to improve the image of the United States in Muslim countries shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, so she could show them to her students.
I was a bit surprised to realize that the ads are fairly hard to locate online, but after some searching, we were able to find copies. To ensure that they will remain available, I uploaded the videos to two popular internet repositories: YouTube, where people can easily find them and drop them into their own web pages; and the Internet Archive, which should ensure that they survive for posterity.
Twenty or fifty years from now, scholars wishing to understand
the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world
will certainly be interested in studying the "Shared Values" campaign.
As my professor friend wrote back after finding the videos, "The ads
are a great teaching tool about propaganda." Like most propaganda, they
tell us a great deal about how the propagandists see themselves as well
as how they want to be perceived by others.
"Shared Values" was
part of a public relations campaign launched by Charlotte Beers, a
former Madison Avenue advertising executive who was appointed by Colin
Powell as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and asked
to help "rebrand" the United States to improve its image in Muslim
countries.
In practice, the Shared Values campaign ran up
against rising Muslim anger following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan
and then Iraq. As we have pointed out on this website on numerous
occasions, the U.S. image has plummeted internationally - especially
among Muslims. Here is how John Stauber and I analyzed Charlotte Beers
and her rebranding effort in our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception:
Dubbed
a "Muslim-as-Apple-Pie" campaign by the New York Times, the "Shared
Values" videos featured photogenic Muslim-Americans playing with their
children and going about their jobs. One TV commercial showed Rawia
Ismail, a Lebanese-born schoolteacher who now lives in Toledo, Ohio.
Her head covered with an Islamic scarf, Ismail was shown with her
smiling children in her all-American kitchen, at a school softball
game, and extolling American values as she taught her class. "I didn't
see any prejudice anywhere in my neighborhood after September 11," she
said.
The problem with these messages is not that they were
necessarily false. The problem is that, like the rest of Charlotte's
web, "Shared Values" avoided discussing the issues at the core of
Muslim resentment of the United States-the Palestinian/Israel conflict
and the history of U.S. intervention in the region. "We know that
there's religious freedom in America, and we like that. What we're
angry about is the arrogant behavior of the U.S. in the rest of the
world," said Ahmad Imron, an economics student in Indonesia after
watching one of the "Shared Values" TV ads.
Viewed today, the
Shared Values campaign, and even our critique of it, looks rather
quaint and naive. Since John and I wrote those words, America's
reputation has been further eroded by the ongoing violence in Iraq and
by photographs of America soldiers gleefully torturing prisoners at Abu
Ghraib. The idea that the United States is a tolerant nation has been
undermined by the behavior of the war's strongest supporters, as
pro-war columnists like Michelle Malkin and blogs like Little Green
Footballs regularly refer to Arabs and Muslims as "vermin" in need of
"sterilization," while campaigning for the "free speech" of U.S.
soldiers who compose humorous songs about killing Iraqis, or rallying
to the defense of a student after his arrest for stealing stealing
copies of the Koran and flushing them down toilets.
After
reviewing opinion polls that found steep declines in America's public
image in every Muslim country surveyed, John and I concluded in Weapons
of Mass Deception that the Shared Values campaign was an "abject
failure." Most observers at the time agreed. The TV ads were
controversial in the countries where they aired, and government-run
channels in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan flatly refused to run them at
all. Less than a month after the launch of "Shared Values," the State
Department abruptly suspended it. "Islamic opinion is influenced more
by what the U.S. does than by anything it can say," commented an
advertising executive in the Wall Street Journal. Charlotte Beers
resigned two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and comments at
O'Dwyer's, a leading public relations industry trade publication,
greeted her departure with cries of "good riddance" and dismissive
comments about her competence.
More recently, a couple of
communications professors, Jami Fullerton and Alice Kendrick, have
argued that the Shared Values ads were more effective than people
realized. Fullerton and Kendrick reached their conclusions by
conducting a survey that involved showing the ads to a test audience of
university students in London and surveying their reactions. They first
announced their findings in 2004, prompting a blistering critique from
journalism professor Lawrence Pintak, who pointed out that only six of
the 105 students surveyed were even Muslims.
Since Pintak wrote
his critique, Fullerton and Kendrick have attempted to bolster their
research by conducting a second survey in London and additional surveys
in Singapore and Cairo. They have published their findings in a book,
titled Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State
Department's Shared Values Initiative. However, much of the substance
of Pintak's criticism still applies. For one thing, all of their
surveys involved small samples of students at international
universities. (Can the reactions of English-speaking students at
American University in Cairo really predict how the rest of the Muslim
world will respond to the ads?) As one book review noted;
"The
two London samples included 5.8% and 17% Muslims respectively, and the
Singapore sample 13% Muslims. Muslims were the largest group (82%) in
the Egyptian sample but the total number of participants in that case
was only 39, potentially compromising the validity of the findings."
Beyond
these methodological concerns, moreover, Pintak correctly observed that
"the whole issue of the effectiveness of the commercials is actually
beside the point." Whatever positive impression the ads might have
generated in people who viewed them was countered by the generally
negative public outcry throughout the Muslim world about the very fact
that they were being broadcast, and the Fullerton/Kendrick survey had
no way of measuring this factor. More importantly still, any positive
effects of the ads have been vastly outweighed by the negative
attitudes that the U.S. has created toward itself through its invasion
and occupation of Iraq.
Regardless
of whether the Shared Values ads were effective, they were in any case
dishonest. Each "Shared Values" video ended with a tag line that said,
"Presented by the Council of American Muslims for Understanding ... and
the American people." But although "the American people" supposedly
co-sponsored the ads, few Americans had ever heard of the Council of
American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU). This is because CAMU was
actually a PR front group, created and funded by the U.S. State
Department.
Front groups are an example of a PR tactic known as
the "third party technique," in which the sponsor of a message seeks to
put their words in someone else's mouth. Usually this is done because
the sponsor thinks the message will seem more credible if someone else
says it. Here is how John and I described CAMU in Weapons of Mass
Deception:
In another effort to achieve "third party
authenticity," a group called the Council of American Muslims for
Understanding (CAMU) launched its own web site, called
OpenDialogue.com. "It will be government-funded, but it's not
government-founded. I'd like to say we founded it," said the group's
chairman, Malik Hasan, who nonetheless admitted that the idea for CAMU
began with the State Department. Visitors to the website, whose
declared mission was "bringing people and cultures together through
dialogue," were invited to send away for a free copy of "Muslim Life in
America," view the stories of Rawia Ismail and the others profiled in
the "Shared Values" TV commercials, or to "tell us your story" by
sending an e-mail.
The striking thing about the CAMU web site,
however, is how little real dialogue it enabled. This is, after all,
the twenty-first century. Internet newsgroups, web forums, email
listservs and even web cams have long ago perfected the technologies
that enable real dialogue to occur in real time between people
throughout the world. The absence of opportunities for genuine dialogue
may explain why OpenDialogue.com has been irrelevant to most people
seeking information about U.S.-Muslim relations. A Google search on
April 8, 2003 found only 58 other web pages that link to OpenDialogue,
most of which were sites run by U.S. embassies or other government
agencies. For comparison's sake, there were 2,200 links to
IslamiCity.com, a site that discusses world affairs from a Muslim point
of view.
After the Shared Values campaign ended, CAMU's
government funding dried up, and the group quietly disappeared, as did
its website. When I visited OpenDialogue.com just now, I found a
commercial spam site with popup ads that crashed my web browser. You
can still find a copy of the original website, however, at the Internet
Archive. On its "questions and answers" page, CAMU described itself as
"a private, non-profit, non-partisan and non-political organization."
This,
of course, is deliberate deception. An organization created by the U.S.
State Department is certainly not "private," and it is only
"non-political" if we interpret that term in the narrow sense of "not
involved in electoral politics." (Malik Hasan, its chairman, is a
wealthy Republican activist who subsequently became a founding member
of "Muslims for Bush.")
One of the hallmarks of propaganda is
that its practitioners are wholly preoccupied with the question of
whether their message "works" and are indifferent to the question of
whether their message is "true." At the risk of sounding like a
moralist and scold, I believe that honesty is important in
communications, even if dishonest messages sometimes "produce the
results we want." This, however, is a point that Fullerton and Kendrick
do not seem to have considered in their analysis.
Ultimately,
though, I think propaganda fails even the "effectiveness" test.
Propaganda is the language through which power expresses itself. By its
very nature, it is incapable of sustaining the sort of dialogue that
creates genuine understanding between different cultures. If Americans
truly wish to be respected and appreciated by the rest of the world, we
have to find other ways of communicating.
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