120811333_3_Martha_Bayles–Exporting_the_Wrong_Picture_1.pdf

172 Martha

For many multinationals, the answer increasingly seems to be
to downplay any U.S. heritage or even a single global identity.
Neville Isdell, new chief executive of Coca-Cola, is typical of many
business leaders who work hard to stress local credentials with
sports sponsorship and customised advertising. “We are not an
American brand,” he says.

Starbucks, the coffee chain, has thrived by making more of its
products’ associations with the developing world than of its own
Seattle heritage. But Doug Holt, professor of marketing at the
Said School of Business in Oxford, cautions against running away
from historic roots entirely. “Local is not always better,” he warns.
“People assign value to brands that have succeeded globally; that’s
why multinational companies do so well.”

If nothing else, the trend reveals a declining confidence in the
aspirational pull of the U.S. Simon Anholt, author of Brand
America, sums up how far the U.S. has slipped from its pedestal:
“The world’s love affair with America isn’t exactly over, but it has
stopped being a blind and unquestioning kind of love.”

Questions for Discussion and Writing

1. This article suggests that there are certain products that “mean” America for
people in other countries. Make a list of the ones mentioned in this essay
and then write down what elements of American life you feel they represent.

2. Are there products and foods from other countries that you feel represent
those nations? What kinds of things are you thinking of and what ideas do
they give you about other cultures?

3. Imagine that you are a salesperson and what you are selling is an image of
America. What elements of America would you want to emphasize and what
kinds of products and images might you use to present your sales

Exporting the Wrong Picture
MARTHA BAYLES

Martha Bayles is the author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty
and Meaning in American Popular Music (Chicago), teaches
humanities at Boston College, and is working on a book about U.S.
cultural diplomacy. She has written widely about the role of music
in popular culture. Dr. Bayles has also written articles on Miles

Exporting the Wrong Picture 173

Davis for The New York Times and is a contributor to the Wall
Street Journal. In this article, published in The Washington Post on
August 28, 2005, the writer discusses how the elements of popular
culture that are exported from the United States influence the views of
those overseas, and how they directly impact other cultures.

+—-­

W hen Benjamin Franklin went to France in 1776, his assign­ment was to manipulate the French into supporting the
American war for independence. This he accomplished with two
stratagems: First, he played the balance-of-power game as deftly
as any European diplomat; and second, he waged a subtle but
effective campaign of what we now call public diplomacy, or the
use of information and culture to foster goodwill toward the
nation. For Franklin, this meant turning his dumpy self into a
symbol. “He knew that America had a unique and powerful mean­
ing for the enlightened reformers of France,” writes historian
Bernard Bailyn, “and that he himself … was the embodiment, the
palpable expression, of that meaning.” Hence the fur cap and
rustic manner that made Franklin a celebrity among the
powdered wigs and gilded ornaments of the court of Louis XVI.

Today, as we witness the decline of America’s reputation
around the world, we’re paying far more attention to Franklin’s
first stratagem than to his second. Indeed, despite a mounting
stack of reports recommending drastic changes in the organiza­
tion and funding of public diplomacy, very little of substance has
been done. And most Americans, including many who make it
their business to analyze public diplomacy, seem unmindful of
the negative impression that America has recently been making
on the rest of humanity-via our popular culture.

A striking pattern has emerged since the end of the Cold War.
On the one hand, funding for public diplomacy has been cut by
more than 30 percent since 1989, the National Science Board
reported last year. On the other hand, while Washington was
shrinking its funding for cultural diplomacy, Hollywood was
aggressively expanding its exports. The Yale Center for the Study
of Globalization reports that between 1986 and 2000 the
generated by the export of filmed and taped entertainment went
from $1.68 billion to $8.85 billion-an increase of 427 rlPf’C’Pln
Foreign box-office revenue has grown faster than domestic, and
now approaches a 2-to-1 ratio. The pattern is similar for music,
TV and video games.

174 Martha Bayles

This massive export of popular culture has been accompanied
by domestic worries about its increasingly coarse and violent
tone-worries that now go beyond the polarized debates of the
pre-9111 culture war. For example, a number of prominent
African Americans, such as Bill Stephney, co-founder of the rap
group Public Enemy, have raised concerns about the normaliza­
tion of crime and prostitution in gangsta and “crunk” rap. And in
April 2005, the Pew Research Center reported that “roughly six­
in-ten [Americans] say they are very concerned over what chil­
dren see or hear on TV (61%), in music lyrics (61%), video games
(60%) and movies (56%).”

These worries now have a global dimension. The 2003 report of
the U.S. House of Representatives Advisory Group on Public
Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World stated that “Arabs and
Muslims are … bombarded with American sitcoms, violent films,
and other entertainment, much of which distorts the perceptions of
viewers.” The report made clear that what seems innocuous to
Americans can cause problems abroad: “A Syrian teacher of English
asked us plaintively for help in explaining American family life to
her students. She asked, ‘Does Friends show a typical family?'”

One of the few efforts to measure the impact of popular
culture abroad was made by Louisiana State University
researchers Melvin and Margaret De Fleur, who in 2003 polled
teenagers in 12 countries: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, South Korea,
Mexico, China, Spain, Taiwan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Nigeria, Italy
and Argentina. Their conclusion, while tentative, is nonetheless
suggestive: “The depiction of Americans in media content as
violent, of American women as sexually immoral and of many
Americans engaging in criminal acts has brought many of these
1,313 youthful subjects to hold generally negative attitudes
toward people who live in the United States.”

Popular culture is not a monolith, of course. Along with a lot
of junk, the entertainment industry still produces films, musical
recordings, even television shows that rise to the level of genuine
art. The good (and bad) news is that censorship is a thing of the
past, on both the producing and the consuming end of popular
culture. Despite attempts by radical clerics in Iraq to clamp down
on Western influences, pirated copies of American movies still
make it onto the market there. If we go by box office figures, the
most popular films in the world are blockbusters like Harry Potter.
But America is also exporting more than enough depictions of
profanity, nudity, violence and criminal activity to violate norms
of propriety still honored in much of the world.

Exporting the Wrong Picture 175

But instead of questioning whether Americans should be
super-sizing to others the same cultural diet that is giving us indi­
gestion at home, we still seem to congratulate ourselves that our
popular culture now pervades just about every society on Earth,
including many that would rather keep it out. Why this disconnect?
Partly it is due to an ingrained belief that what’s good for show
business is good for America’s image. During both world wars,
the movie studios produced propaganda for the government, in
exchange for government aid in opening resistant foreign markets.
Beginning in 1939, the recording industry cooperated with the
Armed Forces Network to beam jazz to American soldiers overseas,
and during the Cold War it helped the Voice of America (VOA) do
the same for 30 million listeners behind the Iron Curtain.

In his book, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War, veteran
foreign service officer Yale Richmond quotes the Russian novelist
Vasily Aksyonov, for whom those VOA jazz broadcasts were
“America’s secret weapon number one.” Aksyonov said that “the
snatches of music and bits of information made for a kind of
golden glow over the horizon … the West, the inaccessible but oh
so desirable West.”

To my knowledge, this passage has not been quoted in
defense of Radio Sawa, the flagship of the U.S. government’s
new fleet of broadcast channels aimed at reaching young, largely
Arab audiences. But even if it were, who could imagine such a
reverent, yearning listener in the Middle East, South Asia or
anywhere else today? The difference is not just between short­
wave radio and unlimited broadband, it is also between Duke
Ellington and 50 Cent.

During the Cold War, Washington also boosted the commer­
cial export of popular culture, adhering to the view set forth in a
1948 State Department memo: “American motion pictures,
as ambassadors of good will-at no cost to the American tax­
payers-interpret the American way of life to all the nations of the
world, which may be invaluable from a political. cultural, and
commercial point of view.”

And this boosterism continued through the 1960s and ’70s,
even as movies and rock music became not just unruly but down­
right adversariaL During the 1970s, the government worked so
hard to pry open world markets to American entertainment that
UNESCO and the Soviet Union led a backlash against “U.S.
cultural imperialism.” In 1967, the VOA began to broadcast rock
and souL And while a provocative figure like Frank Zappa was
hardly a favorite at diplomatic receptions, many in the foreign

176 Martha Bayles

service understood his symbolic importance to dissidents, includ­
ing Czech playwright (and later president) Vaclev Havel. In
general. the u.s. political establishment was content to let
America’s homegrown counterculture do its subversive thing in
Eastern Europe and Russia.

In the 1980s, the mood changed. Under Ronald Reagan
appointee Charles Z. Wick, the United States Information Agency
(USIA), the autonomous agency set up in 1953 to disseminate
information and handle cultural exchange, was more generously
funded and invited to playa larger role in policymaking-but at the
price of having its autonomy curbed and the firewall between
cultural outreach and policy advocacy thinned. It is noteworthy
that these changes occurred amid the acrimony of the culture wars.
Like the National Endowment for the Arts and public broadcasting,
the USIA eventually found itself on Sen. Jesse Helms’s list of artsy
agencies deserving of the budgetary tax. And while the others
managed to survive, the USIA did not. In 1999 it was absorbed into
the very different bureaucratic culture of the State Department.

Today we witness the outcome: an unwarranted dismissal of
elite-oriented cultural diplomacy, combined with an unques­
tioned faith in the export of popular culture. These converge in
the decision to devote the bulk of post-9Ill funding to Radio
Sawa and the other commercial-style broadcast entities, such as
al-Hurra (a U.S.-based satellite TV network aimed at Arab listen­
ers) and Radio Farda (which is broadcast in Farsi to Iran).
Because the establishment of these new channels has been
accompanied by the termination of the VOXs Arabic service, crit­
ics have focused largely on their news components. But what
benefit is there in Radio Sawa’s heavy rotation of songs by sex
kitten Britney Spears and foul-mouthed rapper Eminem?

To the charge that the Bush administration is peddling smut
and profanity to Arab teens, Radio Sawa’s music director, Usama
Farag, has stated that all the offensive lyrics are carefully edited
out. Yet there is something quaint about the U.S. government’s
censoring song lyrics in a world where most people have ready
access to every product of the American entertainment industry,
including the dregs.

American popular culture is no longer a beacon of freedom
to huddled masses in closed societies. Instead, it’s a glut on the
market and, absent any countervailing cultural diplomacy, our de
facto ambassador to the world. The solution to this problem is
far from clear. Censorship is not the answer, because even if it
were technologically possible to censor our cultural exports, it

Exporting the Wrong Picture 177

would not be politic. The United States must affirm the crucial
importance of free speech in a world that has serious doubts
about it, and the best way to do this is to show that freedom is
self-correcting-that Americans have not only liberty but also a
civilization worthy of liberty.

From Franklin’s days, U.S. cultural diplomacy has had both an
elite and a popular dimension. Needless to say, it has rarely been
easy to achieve a perfect balance between the two. What we could
do is try harder to convey what the USIA mandate used to call “a full
and fair picture of the United States.” But to succeed even a little,
our new efforts must counter the negative self-portrait we are now
exporting. Along with worrying about what popular culture is teach­
ing our children about life, we need also to worry about what it is
teaching the world about America.

Questions for Discussion and Writing

1. In this article it is reported that in a survey of youths overseas “the depiction
of Americans in media content as violent, of American women as sexually
immoral and of many Americans engaging in criminal acts has brought many
of these 1,313 youthful subjects to hold generally negative attitudes toward
people who live in the United States.” Is this due to the media depiction of
America or does it have to do with the attitudes and understanding of the
viewers in other countries? How responsible should the media outlets be
about the ways in which the United States is represented in entertainment?

2. Martha Bayles seems to suggest that the concepts of diplomacy and
popular culture are at odds with each other and that the desired impact of
diplomacy is undercut by the violence. profanity, and nudity in popular
culture. Do you think that she is right or is she underestimating the
of foreign viewers and listeners to tell the difference?

3. The writer states that “The United States must affirm the crucial importance
of free speech in a world that has serious doubts about it, and the best way
to do this is to show that freedom is self-correcting-that Americans have
not only liberty but also a civilization worthy of liberty.” What do you
take to mean by “self-correcting”? What would be the advantages of this
approach and what could be the possible problems?

4. The u.s. State Department produces documents to promote U.s. cultural
issues to the rest of the world. You can access these through the following
URL: http://usinfo.state.gov/journalsljournals.htm. One of the areas covered
here is that of U.s. society and values. Read some of the articles and write an
explanation for someone overseas to explain how these depictions of U.s.
life compare to your own experiences.

http://usinfo.state.gov/journalsljournals.htm