Brands are now Production Studios…will Government Brands be left behind, or will they produce content…and is that propanda?
FULL DISCLOSURE AND DISCLAIMER- I am a Public Affair Officer for the U.S. Army, and thus an employee of the Federal Government. The following are my opinions and should not in any way be perceived as an official statement or position of the U.S. Government.
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Most marketing pros these days have either expressed, or heard of the idea that brands can be/are/should be their own production studios. I mean, current technology allows it. Studio quality HD cameras and full editing suites are now even affordable to individuals and don’t require the massive investments they used to. Traditional advertising is less effective and more expensive, so it makes sense to venture into this new territory of brand-based entertainment. Lots of major brands are already doing it…Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Red Bull, GE, BMW, etc., etc.
So, if brands are essentially becoming (or have already become) production studios, creating compelling and entertaining content, what is going to happen to government brands? Will they jump on the production-house band wagon, or will they be left behind? After all, our government is full of brands. Every Congressman and Senator is their own brand (like any pro athlete or entertainer), nearly every department (CIA, FBI, EPA, Army, Marines, Treasury, etc., etc., etc….) is their own brand (like any corporation), and you could even argue that the Supreme Court is their own brand (as a body and as individuals).
Government agencies are already producing their own content. The military has its own network of global media outlets. Granted most of them are targeting internal audiences, but cable providers distribute “The Pentagon Channel” nationwide. The Army has even produced entertainment content, although they are legally permitted to do so provided it supports their recruiting effort…but that’s a broad and easily defensible test. Where’s the line? Who draws it? Technology is moving faster than our legislative bodies are able to adapt, so who’s keeping our government from overstepping its bounds?
The U.S. Army iPhone App
Today, nearly every government agency has a web site with its own internally produced
news items, and some not-so-newsy-items. The government, like everyone else, used to rely on the media to communicate and filter their messages. But not anymore. Frankly, we can all go direct to our audiences now. The Army, and even the
White House now have their own free iPhone applications (both are free…you should check them out for yourself, click here for the THE ARMY APP and THE WHITE HOUSE APP). But how healthy is that for a democracy when the government skips the “fourth estate” …who arguably is asleep at the wheel while dying on the
vine (excuse the mixed metaphors please). Where are the watchdogs in all of this?
The White House iPhone app
Further, in this emerging era of “transmedia” where the lines between news and entertainment, tv and the internet, fact and fiction are getting blurrier with every evolutionary phase of Moore’s Law, when does government communication become propaganda?
Below is an excerpt from Kevin R. Kosar’s, “The Law: The Executive Branch and Propaganda: The Limits of Legal Restrictions,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 35, no. 4, December 2005. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Especially my readers who are, or were, government communicators.
“How is it that the federal government can produce propaganda?” Well, the answer is rather simple: the laws of our nation do little to stop propaganda.
If you search American law, the U.S. code [http://uscode.house.gov/] for the word “propaganda,” you won’t find much. You might read that “foreign agents” who propagandize must register with the U.S. government, but you won’t find any law that prohibits the U.S. government from promoting the U.S. and its policies to citizens in other nations. “Public diplomacy” and, in the military context, “information warfare” are permissible and have long been practiced by the federal government.
But, what about federal propaganda targeting domestic audiences? (5 U.S.C. 3107) prohibits our government from using federal money “for the compensation of any publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose.” And Congressional appropriations acts often include provisions stating “No part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes not heretofor authorized by Congress.” Together, these prohibitions might seem like a formidable bulwark against federal agencies and officers engaged in activities to promote government policies and people.
Why, one might wonder, don’t they? Well, a host of minor reasons might be cited, but the big problem is that Congress never bothered to define what constitutes “propaganda” or “public relations.” 1 A search of the public record for Congress’s intent turns up only a brief colloquy in 1913 before the adoption of the prohibition against the employment of publicity experts. Rep. Frederick H. Gillett (R-MA), who was displeased to learn that the Office of Public Roads of the Department of Agriculture sought to hire a publicity expert, proposed an amendment to an appropriations bill. Rep. Asbury F. Lever (D-SC) sought clarification — “The gentleman has defined the publicity expert … [as] a man whose business is to extol and exploit the virtues of [an] agency. The gentleman does not undertake in this amendment to prevent some one employed by the Department of Agriculture, for instance, giving to the country information as to the work of the department?” Rep. Gillett responded, “Of course not.” And there you have it — the law prohibits hiring a public relations flack to promote an agency itself, but does not prohibit the promotion of an agency’s policies or works.
Readers might be tempted to condemn Congress for failing to define what constitutes acceptable agency communications with the public and what is “propaganda.” The problem, though, is that defining good government communications from bad ones is not easy task. Crack open the Oxford English Dictionary and one finds “propaganda” defined as the “systematic propagation of information or ideas by an interested party, especially in a tendentious way in order to encourage or instill a particular attitude or response.” Defined thus, the Department of Transportation’s media campaigns to discourage drunken driving and nearly every campaign for public office might constitute “propaganda.” A peek at Dictionary.com also doesn’t carry one much further — “The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.”
The challenges of defining propaganda are formidable and may call to the reader’s mind Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), which involved a theater manager being arrested for showing an erotic French film. Stewart wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of “hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…” or a more thorough discussion of this subject, see Kevin R. Kosar, “The Law: The Executive Branch and Propaganda: The Limits of Legal Restrictions,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 35, no. 4, December 2005.
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