Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 31

Ben was as good as his word. Within a couple of weeks after our sitdown, a meeting was on the calendar with President Obama on international broadcasting. Ben told me this was an ideas meeting where, once a month or so, the President called together a group in the Situation Room to brainstorm about one topic. This would be a whole hour devoted to international broadcasting.

Ben said that I should do an overview of international broadcasting, discuss State’s role, and mention any other quick observations I’d made since I arrived. Okay.

I got to the White House early and had a few minutes with one of Ben’s aides. Let’s call him Jaden. Jaden was a State staffer who had been tapped by the NSC to come over to Ben’s shop. He had served in Africa and South America. He was sharp and smart, had a goatee and a conspiratorial manner. He mentioned that he was going to be presenting about our response to Russian media. I knew from Ben and others that people at the NSC were concerned about Russia Today, the state-supported news channel that broadcast in the United States as RT. I wasn’t quite sure why. One story I heard was that Vice President Biden had turned on his television in a hotel room in Europe and thought he was watching CNN, and then … slowly … realized … it was RT. Jaden said his presentation was about the idea of the U.S. standing up its own version of RT.

Jaden showed me his PowerPoint presentation: it was titled “The Freedom News Network.” The idea was essentially to take the annual BBG budget and create an international U.S. government television network. While I wasn’t a gigantic fan of Voice of America or any of the other BBG entities, this plan was, well, crazy. The idea that the U.S. government would spend three-quarters of a billion dollars to create content 24/7, find and hire the people to do so, figure out shows and schedules, license content, and get carriage around the world on both satellite and terrestrial TV providers was absurd. I knew there were some Congressmen who were saying we should do this (and in fact, a bill would later be introduced to create the Freedom News Network), and I knew there were some people in government who thought that’s what the United States Information Agency had done (they were mistaken), but my overwhelming conviction was that this would do more to hurt America’s image than to help it.

And that wasn’t even the main reason that it was a dumb idea. The main reason was: don’t compete against yourself. No, we didn’t have an exact equivalent of Russia Today, but we had CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and CBS and the Discovery Channel and PBS and the National Geographic channel and on and on and on. We had Facebook and Google and Instagram. We had Game of Thrones for chrissakes. Someone had earlier mentioned to me that Russia Today got about the same rating in the U.K. as CNN. I went and checked and that was true. But RT was literally the only Russian channel in the top 100 channels watched in the U.K.—and the U.S. had more than 40, everything from Lifetime to the Cartoon Network. I wouldn’t trade that for a U.S. version of RT. America’s soft power in terms of TV, movies, and pop music far outweighed in influence, scope, and power anything the American government could create, much less Russia Today. RT didn’t have enough viewers in the U.S. to even qualify for a Nielsen rating.

One of the things I’d noticed in government is that people who had never been in media, who had never written a story or produced one, who didn’t know about design or graphics, who didn’t understand audiences or what they liked, seemed to think it was easy to create content. People had the illusion that because they consumed something, they understood how it worked.

I didn’t say much to Jaden about the idea before the meeting began. I had a place setting about two-thirds of the way down the table from where the President sat. Ben was sitting directly to the President’s left and spoke first. He very briefly and graciously introduced me. The President said, “Hi, Rick,” but in a completely businesslike way. When Ben called on me, I went straight to the nitty-gritty of the State Department’s relationship to BBG and why it wasn’t working. I mentioned that I was the first PD Under Secretary in memory who had actually gone to the board meetings. That the “editorials” that State did on Voice of America and other services were a waste of time. I made the case that the BBG entities, instead of spending all their time creating content, should actually aggregate U.S. news coverage and present that to foreign audiences. Voice of America should be Choice of America. (That got a couple of smiles.) I mentioned what I used to say about Time’s website, which was smaller than those of our big competitors: curate more, create less. If we simply showed people around the world the reporting that American journalists already were doing, we would also get credit for how we cover ourselves. It would be a model. See, that’s what the First Amendment is all about. Try it! In short, I was saying pretty clearly, Let’s not create a gigantic American-government news network.

When I finished, the President leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, and went up to 30,000 feet himself. He’d obviously thought about all this and proceeded to engage in a Socratic dialogue, mostly with himself.

“What’s the problem we’re trying to address here?” he asked.

His answer was pretty simple: we want people around the world to be able to get our point of view on things.

“What is it that we want them to have?”

His answer: “Usable information.”

“Who do we want to reach?”

I want to speak to a global audience, he said, but what I’m most interested in is reaching 15 or so countries. We talk about global public opinion, but I’m more interested in public opinion in a few specific places. I want to talk to the man in the barbershop in Istanbul. The young woman teacher in São Paolo. The businessman in Abu Dhabi. The factory worker in Munich. He was frustrated that our image was more negative than it should be.

He conspicuously did not mention Russia. Russia wasn’t among the top 15 countries he wanted to reach.

“What are the tools to do that?”

He asked whether we could license or commission local content in those countries. And what’s the best content to give them? Is it news or is it game shows or reality TV? He said we needed to do more market research.

I had the sense then—which I would have a number of times while I was at State—that the President had thought more about the issues being talked about than anyone else in the room, knew more about those issues, and had come up with better answers than anyone else. This was both a good and a not-so-good thing.

Ben then called on Jaden. Jaden was backbenching, sitting against the wall, and stood up and sketched out the idea of the Freedom News Network. He essentially gave the same presentation he had done for me a little earlier. I was prepared to weigh in on this if no one else did.

Everyone could see from the President’s body language that he wasn’t very taken with the idea. He had twisted himself into a pretzel. He was quiet. He wasn’t looking at Jaden. He then perfunctorily asked a couple of very small questions, and then said, Let’s move on. It just wasn’t an Obama kind of fix. I always hated it when people would say at meetings, “There are no bad ideas.” Unfortunately, there are—a lot of them. I wish that just once I had heard someone say, “You know what, that’s a really terrible idea.”

As I saw Obama again in other similar situations, I came to believe that he was essentially a small c, Edmund Burke kind of conservative. That is, the first thing he did in every situation was to look at whether doing something was actually going to make the situation worse than doing nothing. And often he came to the conclusion that, yes, it would. Plus, he only ever wanted to use as much wrench as necessary to turn the bolt. It was the Occam’s razor school of foreign policy: the solution shouldn’t be more complex than the problem. Keep it simple. Don’t fix things that aren’t broken. Don’t do dumb stuff. Spending three-quarters of a billion dollars to start up a global U.S. government news network to reach a 24-year-old sitting in a barber’s chair in Istanbul was not the simplest solution to the problem.

The president ended the discussion by saying, with a tone of frustration, “We’ve been talking about this for five years.”