Global Spin Doctors

We endure, ignore, or fall prey to as many as 20,000 ads a day. That's one ad every three seconds of our waking hours. We wear ads on our shirts, forward commercials via email, sing jingles with our friends, and even brand corporate icons on our bodies. We've developed vaccines to address this particular virus. There's Naomi Klein's No Logo and the cheeky magazine Adbusters. There's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's radio program Counterspin and the ad-stripping features of TiVo. But the virus continues to mutate and spread.

Geopolitics is not immune to this disease. Flip through any foreign policy magazine and you'll find plenty of advertising. Governments, desperate for foreign investment and tourists, take out glossy "sponsored sections" in Foreign Affairs and "special advertising supplements" in Foreign Policy. The recent news from Nigeria has been pretty bleak: endemic corruption, bloody insurgency in the Niger Delta, fraudulent elections in 2007. The 10-page spread in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, however, mentions none of that: It's all about growth, transparency, and investor confidence. Angola hired a slicker PR firm to design its recent 24-page section in Foreign Policy: nice pictures and graphics, upbeat interviews, and the repeated message that the country has lots and lots of oil. None of the smiling interview subjects mentions that the country hasn't had a democratic election in two decades or that two-thirds of Angolans live on less than $2 a day.

Some of the spinning borders on the surreal. Equatorial Guinea paid the PR firm Cassidy & Associates $120,000 a month for an image makeover, which required transforming an oil-rich dictatorship ruled by the ultra-corrupt Teodoro Obiang into a palatable U.S. ally. All that loot translated into a prominent photo op with Condi Rice and her comment that Obiang was a "good friend." When celebrities say stupid things in public or get nabbed for shoplifting, their agents shift into overdrive. The same thing happens to countries that get nailed in public for their horrendous human rights abuses. This is what Cassidy & Associates calls crisis communications: "[W]e put this strength to work on behalf of clients that require immediate communications support to protect themselves in the face of unexpected public image challenges."

What takes place behind the scenes is perhaps the most pernicious. After all, we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the obvious advertisements. We would never fall for Nigeria's third-rate spread in Foreign Affairs. We would never succumb to the seductions of a TV infomercial. We would never click on the ubiquitous pop-ups. But what about all the money that governments circulate through the media universe to grease wheels, influence politicians, or secure prized appearances on the TV talk shows?

Indeed, the PR race is not that different from the arms race. Russia, for instance, recently paid nearly $3 million to Ketchum for a six-month media blitz to promote the country's leaders and policies. Georgia has retained Public Strategies, Inc. at $50,000 a month. And the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have hired Mark Saylor Co. at $30,000 a month. An uptick of spending on one side will inevitably lead to an increase on the other side, as PR becomes war by other means. The firms hope that the spin they set in motion will, through the alchemy of the media, turn into "facts" in an editorial, or an op-ed, or even a reporter's dispatch.

Since 1938 and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, U.S. firms must disclose their relationships with foreign governments and entities. According to Kevin McCauley of O'Dwyer's Public Relations News, these relationships began to snowball after the end of the Cold War. Kuwait's government-in-exile put Hill and Knowlton on a princely retainer; Mexico hired several firms during the NAFTA negotiations; China launched a media blitz around the Hong Kong handover. "Post-9/11," McCauley points out, "Saudi Arabia hired a number of firms to send out the message that it is a good ally, to stress the point that there is more moderation in Saudi Arabia." Riyadh spends around $12 million a year to make sure that the U.S. media stays on this message.

With all this spin - overt and covert - what's a poor reader to do? The last thing we should do is sit and spin with it. So, after all this decrying of advertising, let me end with a plug: for our very own Foreign Policy In Focus. We don't take handouts from the Nigerian or Georgian governments. We rely on the support of foundations and individuals like you to provide unvarnished news, features, and analysis.

Hah, what did I tell you? Advertising is everywhere.

Cross-posted from Foreign Policy In Focus, where you can read the full post. To subscribe to FPIF's e-zine World Beat, click here.