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A Blog on Understanding, Informing, Empowering, and Influencing Global Publics, published by Matt Armstrong

Smith-Mundt Act

Modern international relations lie between peoples, not merely governments.

The Smith-Mundt Act is misunderstood and often mistaken for “anti-propanganda” legislation intended to censor the Government.  The reality is the original prohibition on the State Department disseminating inside the U.S. its own information products designed for audiences abroad was, first, to protect the Government from the State Department and, second, to protect commercial media.  The legislation as intended and as it exists today applies only to one area of the State Department and not the whole of government.

While it is easy to dismiss Smith-Mundt today as insignificant or irrelevant, continuing misperceptions of its purpose and impact severely hampers U.S. global engagement.  It implicitly labels many news and engagement activities by the Government as “propaganda” by declaring it unfit for consumption within our borders.  The prohibition on allowing the content to be available inside the U.S. creates and encourages opposing views in how we operate and organize.  In the physical world, the split is domestic against foreign.  In the bureaucratic and organizational, it is public affairs versus public diplomacy, and in the conceptual or doctrinal domain we see the difference in inform and listen against engage and empower.

Twenty-first century diplomacy cannot work when public diplomacy is seen as something else.  There is no “inform but not influence” and the conversations must sometimes not include us.

Public Diplomacy is today, as it was when it was coined in 1965, an adversarial term.  I don’t mean in terms of terrorism, communism, or some other -ism, but bureaucratically.  After twenty years of being simply public affairs, it was evidently required to set activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics apart from something else.  It would take about a decade or more for the term to reach the field.

The whole movement of trying to “bring public diplomacy into diplomacy” reflects this perception as something else.  Public Affairs today speaks of informing and listening whereas public diplomacy uses the terms engage and empower.

The separation of public diplomacy from public affairs, which was not an intent of Smith-Mundt but a product of changing environment and historical myopia, makes public diplomacy “dirty” and unfit for the people within our borders.  More importantly, it hobbles public diplomacy, and other similar activities as the myth of Smith-Mundt pretends to cover all “influence” activities, while empowering public affairs, or “inform and listen, but not influence.”

This page will change substantially when I complete a history of the Smith-Mundt Act that focuses on 1943-1948, but it will also put into context major amendments to the Act that occurred in 1972, 1985, and 1999.

In the meantime, below is a list of resources valuable to anyone interested in the truth of Smith-Mundt.

More information will be posted here later.

Reforming Smith-Mundt: Making American Public Diplomacy Safe for Americans

An article by Matt Armstrong, available at World Politics Review:

American public diplomacy has been the subject of many reports and much discussion over the past few years. But one rarely examined element is the true impact of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which for all practical purposes labels U.S. public diplomacy and government broadcasting as propaganda. The law imposes a geographic segregation of audiences between those inside the U.S. and those outside it, based on the fear that content aimed at audiences abroad might “spill over” into the U.S. This not only shows a lack of confidence and understanding of U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting, it also ignores the ways in which information and people now move across porous, often non-existent borders with incredible speed and ease, to both create and empower dynamic diasporas.

The impact of the “firewall” created by Smith-Mundt between domestic and foreign audiences is profound and often ignored. Ask a citizen of any other democracy what they think about this firewall and you’re likely to get a blank, confused stare: Why — and how — would such a thing exist? No other country, except perhaps North Korea and China, prevents its own people from knowing what is said and done in their name. …

The 1948 language also gave the media and academics, in addition to Congress, some say in determining what elements of public diplomacy being directed abroad were also fit for American consumption. But in 1985, Sen. Edward Zorinsky declared that even this was too much: Failing to shield Americans from the United States Information Agency would make the U.S. no different than the Soviet Union, “where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.” U.S. public diplomacy was so “dangerous” that it was exempted from the Freedom of Information Act that enforced transparency in government. Congress became the sole arbiter of what the taxpayer could see.

Today, any public diplomacy product from the State Department or the Broadcasting Board of Governors may only be made available within the U.S. by an act of Congress. Naturally, these acts take time. For example, requests by NATO, Johns Hopkins and Harvard, among others, to show a 2008 Voice of America documentary film on Afghanistan’s poppy harvest were denied because of Smith-Mundt. The process for congressional approval began in early 2009, and as of today, it is still pending. Meanwhile, the video has been available on YouTube since 2008.

Congress has no similar concerns when it comes to content produced by foreign governments and their official news agencies. Congress decided in 1994 that “political propaganda” by foreign governments was safe for Americans. …

 

2009 Smith-Mundt Symposium

Read the 23-page Final Report on the 2009 Smith-Mundt Symposium (442kb PDF) summary of the landmark 2009 Smith-Mundt Symposium. Held on January 13, 2009, just one week before the Obama Administration came
into office and just short of the Smith-Mundt Act’s sixty‐first anniversary,
this one‐day event fueled an emerging discourse inside and outside of Government
on the purpose and structure of public diplomacy. The symposium was convened and chaired by Matt Armstrong.

Filling the largest room of the Reserve Officers Association on Capitol Hill,
the symposium was an on the record frank discussion among a diverse group of stakeholders, practitioners, and observers from Congress, the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, and outside of government, many of whom never had a reason to be in the same room with one another before, to discuss public diplomacy, strategic communication, or whatever their particular “tribe” calls communication and engagement. Few other times before or since have military psychological operations officers sat next to cultural diplomats or a rear admiral in charge of public affairs sat with a senior reporter from a national newspaper.

Transcripts, audio, panelist bios, press packet and an electronic library sent to the attendees are all available at the event’s website.

 

U.S. Law

The original legislation: Public Law 80-402: The United States Information and Educational Exchange Act, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act 

Key Dates for the Smith-Mundt Bill and its predecessor, the Bloom Bill

  • October 1945 – Bloom Bill introduced in Committee to disseminate information abroad and fund “interchange” of students, teachers, specialists
  • December 1945 – Bloom Bill out of Committee and to the full Congress
  • January 1946 – AP tells Voice of America and the State Department that it will no longer permit VOA to rebroadcast its wire stories claiming AP will be tainted by stigma of being a government propaganda tool (State Department and other newspaper editors later point out that AP fails to harbor similar qualms when selling to TASS or other foreign government news operations)
  • Feb 1946 – US Ambassador to Russia declares “the Russians declared psychological war on the US, all over the world… a war of ideology and a fight unto the death.”
  • July 20, 1946 – Bloom Bill passes the House after amendment requiring maximal use of private resources
  • Aug 1, 1946 – Amendment to Surplus Property Act of 1944 passed, funds Sen. Fulbright’s exchange programs
  • Aug 2, 1946 – Bloom Bill blocked in Senate by lone Senator; Taft never gave a reason but would support the bill again in the next, the 80th, Congress
  • August 2, 1946 was the last day of the session. Earlier, the Congress rejected the State Department’s request for $19 million for 1947 programming that would today be considered public diplomacy. Congress instead authorized $10 million while publicly complaining about “loafers, incompetents” and “drones” at State.
  • March 1947 – State Department formally asks for legislation to empower and make permanent its global public affairs operations
  • May 1947 – Smith-Mundt Bill introduced, it is largely the same as the Bloom Bill
  • June 5, 1947 – Secretary of State George C. Marshall gives a “routine commencement speech” at Harvard that would launch the Marshall Plan
  • Sep/Oct 1947 – Congressional Delegation to Europe encounters dramatic propaganda from the Communists without little to no defense or response from the US
  • December 1947 – House passes the Smith-Mundt Bill
  • January 1948 – Senate passes the Smith-Mundt Bill
  • January 27, 1948 – President Harry S Truman signs the Smith-Mundt Act

One Response

  • Ron says:

    We are of course talking about monkbots in social media surrounding a comment instantly. Why stop at inform? When you can also use the monkbot to ridicule someone’s post. Brave new world, very China like. Yes, it does stink bitterly that we may pay to have our opinions modified.

    May 19, 2012 at 2:05 pm
    Reply

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