America's PR problem: With friends like BBC/al-Jazeera . . .

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Even by standards of the British Broadcasting System’s normal condescending anti-American paranoia, coverage of the Katrina catastrophe gives new meaning to “schandenfreude”. For those who might not know this German word, a current favorite among the chattering classes, it means “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others”. A ten-cent American definition would be “bitchiness”.

The Beeb was as usual artful, proficient, verbal – even if occasionally wrong on geography, or tangled [as aren’t we all] in the complexities of American federalism,. The U.K., after all, has only recently discovered “devolution” for the Scots, the Welsh, and they hope, Ulster.

Why does anyone have to care? After all, what BBC regards as the Great American Unwashed largely isn’t aware of its existence. There are, of course, those NPRnicks in the ‘burbs and others who have long enjoyed the BBC’s marvelous if somewhat arcane drama based on brilliant British repertory theater.

The reader might well ask why subjugate oneself to this masochism.

Truth is, alas! listening to the BBC is essential to understanding the worldwide reaction to American policy. Like its soulmate, al-Jazeera, the terrorists’ Arab-language satellite TV propagandists, our British cousins have a vast audience for all sorts of reasons. The old “colonials” still seek it out as gospel of the Empire, and the long-suffering British taxpayer is shackled with its mandatory license fee for its fat budgets. Furthermore, again because of language and old ties, in what Jeanne Kirkpatrick labeled so cogently so many years ago as “the blame American first crowd”, the BBC has an American echo chamber on which both sides feed incestuously.

But the U.S. – and particularly the Bush Administration – has one more problem it has not addressed. That’s doubly true if you are, as Bush generally is, taking a hard-headed, pragmatic, practical approach to foreign policy. [No, Mr. Clinton/Carter/Kerry/Bidden, there is no Santa Claus: the corrupt UN and bogus “multilaterialism” will not save the American bacon in the jungle out there which is “the world community”! Only American power applied judiciously will do that.].

There is, therefore, all the more reason to undertake the difficult job of explaining policies and winning friends and influencing people in a digital world exploding with information – and misinformation. That does not mean responding to phony polling in the Third World of supposed growing “anti-Americanism” by commercial organizations which themselves are suspect because of their leftwing agendas.

Those of us who have spent time in Afro-Asia know how ludicrous it is to talk of polling in countries where you are required still, literally, to kiss the feet of your inlaw patriarch or accept as normal local officials as thieves and bullies. Despite nasty critical public statements, an important segment of those in Europe and Afro-Asia cognizant of America’s existence still believe in the fundamental good intent of American society. That is why they swim the Rio Bravo or line up at consulates around the world for immigrant visas.

Yet that image is under attack as it has not been since Soviet “disinformatsi” spread stories about Washington waging germ warfare in Southeast Asia or dumping poison in food shipments saving India and Pakistan from starvation. Ideas – and false propaganda – do matter. Washington has virtually abandoned a strategy dictating the Cold War attempts – from USIS libraries to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – which played such a critical role in bringing down the bloody Soviet monstrosity.

Bush’s confidant and domestic media strategist Karen Hughes takes on a new job – after several failed recent attempts – to pick up where Washington left off a decade ago in telling the world “our story”. It’s a mammoth undertaking. The essence is the apophthegm: “Defend me from my friends [the Beeb, the echoes of American media and unbridled domestic criticism]; I can handle my enemies”. Nor is it encouraging it is placed at the State Department, traditionally the center for hiding American light under a bushel and apologizing for self-interest.

Millions of miles of video tape showing failures of local and federal apparatus to bring relief and comfort to the Gulf Coast as quickly and as massively as behooves the world’s most formidable power has delivered one more blow to the U.S. image. For beyond the snide is an unspoken despairing note: if the U.S. can’t do it, who can? That hope to change for the better, not bogus scientific platitudes about climate change and selfserving star-infested concerts [while famine was allowed to creep up on Niger and French West Africa], is the beginning of alleviating world poverty.

The spectacle of the enormity of human suffering Katrina brought to the city of ”let the good times roll” is what most of the rest of the world has seen. That image has to be countered with how the American dream still lives and how the rest of the world can profit from it. Ms. Hughes has a job cut out for her, as they say.