Studying soft power

BY MAYA RANGANATHAN| IN Books | 09/07/2011
In an era of globalised communication technologies, research is focussing on the potential of media as a means of ‘soft power’, to persuade people and wield influence. The issue of credibility also complicates the study of media as a means of soft po
says MAYA RANGANATHAN in a media research review
At the end of a stock-taking session on Australia-India relations at a policy institute in Sydney last year, the attacks on Indian students in Australia and its effects on bilateral relations figured, as it inevitably does on any discussion relating to the two countries. One of the speakers listed the Australian government’s initiatives in the aftermath of the attacks and pointed to the number of Indian journalists who had visited since then, while another added that there was not much perceptible change in the way Indian journalists reported on Australia despite their having been exposed first-hand to the situation in Australia. The latter cited the case of one Indian journalist who had clearly enjoyed the sojourn in Australia and returned to India to publish one of the most damning accounts of the country and its people.
This is of particular significance in the context of ‘media studies’ as it flags in no uncertain terms the enormity of media influence even across geographical and man-made boundaries. In his essay arguing the importance of ‘Asia for Australia’, Foreign Editor of The Australian Greg Sheridan details how the tech-savvy Indian students in Australia took their problems to the media in India which helped snowball the issue into one that neither the Indian government nor the Australian media could ignore (2009). This in turn forced the Australian government to respond ‘vigorously’. The Commonwealth Government sent its ministers to India to appease the enraged people, invited Indian government and media representatives to assess for themselves the situation in Australia, revamped the laws that had allowed the proliferation of callous money-making vocational training institutes and changed the migration policies. But what is significant is that it was largely the Indian media reportage of the events in Australia that had dealt a hard blow on not just the AU $ 15 billion education industry, but its reputation as well, prompting Australia to engage in the multiple exercises to improve its relations with India. 
Media and ‘soft power’
The consequences of the reportage of the Indian media on the attacks of Indian students in Australia brings to fore the predominant role that media has come to play in the realm of ‘soft power’.  A term coined by Joseph Nye in 1990 and developed further in 2004 and 2008, ‘soft power’ (as against ‘hard power’) is to obtain desired results through co-option and attraction rather than by force. By no means new, as a concept it can be traced to ancient Chinese philosophy and its application perhaps to Hitler whose propaganda machinery supplemented ‘hard power’ to create an image of invincibility. ‘Soft power’ includes non-traditional forces as cultural and commercial goods and may also include military power which can lead to perceptions of ‘super power’.  The US, China and South East Asian nations such as Korea and Taiwan have emphasised the importance of ‘soft power’ in addressing international disputes.
 In today’s world that is increasingly governed by movements of people and technologies, media plays a significant role in creating and nurturing ‘perceptions’ and thus becomes an important means of ‘soft power’.  Indeed the power potential of media for ‘soft power’ is a topic of discussion and research, particularly in the US. For instance, the Clinton Institute set up in 2003 to offer courses in American studies focusses on media and its impact on foreign policy. In an interview its director Prof Kennedy pointed out that the US politics was concerned with winning the propaganda war or what he said the government officials termed ‘managing the media space’. The success (or the lack) with which the US steered public opinion in the case of the Gulf war is well-known, as also Baudrillard’s thesis on it (1995). The anti-Iraq war was a TV war with Ed Turner’s CNN’s live coverage style setting a trend that other TV networks, both in the US and outside have since followed (Wark, 1994: 38).  Interestingly, the emergence of new media technologies that facilitate social networking are seen as both challenging American soft power and augmenting it.
Commenting in the context of the revolution in Egypt, Nye underscored the importance of ‘power-diffusion’ in ‘an information-based world’. He asked, “...what will it mean to wield power in the global information age of the 21st century?” And added, “Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in an information age it may be the state (or non-states) with the best story that wins. Soft power becomes a more important part of the mix.” Closer home, the ways in which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka have been employing new media technologies as a weapon in war has been well-documented (Chalk, 2000;  Jegannathan, 1998; Ranganathan, 2006). And at a more regional level, Indians are only too well acquainted with how media can been employed to promote political party ideologies.
 
Analysing media as a means of ‘soft power’
Is ‘soft power’ then propaganda? Or is it ‘public diplomacy’? Is it to understand the means by which media is co-opted into propaganda or how media engages in propaganda willfully? The answer is neither. ‘Soft power’ includes propaganda, but is a broader concept. According to Nye, ‘attraction’ which is the essence of ‘soft power’ depends on ‘credibility’ and thus the term precludes the orchestrated campaigns of state-actors and at times, non-state actors too. The issue of ‘credibility’ complicates the study of media as a means of ‘soft power’. If ‘credibility’ is called into question where media is controlled by the state, in democracies were media is ‘free,’ it is affected by a number of political, economic, social and cultural factors.  The ‘commercial ownership’ that allows only ‘cleansed residue’ to become news (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 2); the production processes that have led to tabloidisation (Postman, 1985) and ‘present-ness’ of the evolving media technologies (Doanne, 2003: 251-264) have all impacted on the ‘credibility’ of news, lending more power to the agenda-setting theories of the press. Since Nye’s conceptualisation of ‘soft power’ places a premium on ‘seduction,’ the ways by which media attempts to seduce its audiences become significant to the study of media’s soft power potential (2004). Thus, research in this area has focused on the agendas that dictate media messages with specific attention paid to the ‘frames’ that media employs to push agendas.
Based on Shanto Iyengar’s premise that television news shapes how audiences perceive the causes of and the solutions to central political problems, framing analysis helps understand how particular media diverts attention to or deflects attention from issues (1987). ‘Framing’ extends the agenda-setting theory based on the understanding that human beings process information drawing from already established ways of interpreting and understanding information and that employment of particular ‘frames’, often stereotypes, can lead to particular perceptions. For instance, in 1981 Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated that people’s preferences changed when the same problem was presented in different ways. Although applied in the disciplines of sociology, cultural studies and management, the methodology adopted today to study media frames draws from the works of Entman, 1993, 2004, Bendford and Snow, 2000, Tankard, 2001, De Reese, 2005 and Reese, 2007 incorporating mass communication and media theories. It moves beyond a simple analysis of ‘bias’ in media.
A number of studies have been conducted on the way media, both national and international, frame issues differently.  The emergence of Al-Jazeera as an international television channel in 2006 has set off a number of studies on the differing frames employed by the western-based international television channels such as the BBC, the CNN and Al-Jazeera. Issues studied have ranged from reportage on violence in the Middle-East to that of the recent killing of Osama bin Laden. In conflict situations, framing analysis of media reportage is particularly significant as it contributes to an understanding of the trajectory of the conflict and its resolution. The current move in media research is to employ media framing analysis to understand the perception of a region/country internationally and to explore alternative frames that could lead to different perceptions and better understanding among peoples of different regions/countries, in other words to understand the potential of the media for ‘soft power’ and realise it. 
 
Limitations
However, the challenge lies in that it is difficult to distinguish the perceptions created by media from other factors. To put it simply, the US owes its perception as a world leader or super power not just to Hollywood and CNN. Media at best functions as an adjunct to many civilian instruments including diplomacy, economic development and financial assistance, the precise extent of influence of each on people’s perceptions remaining immeasurable. To go back to the initial example of the incidents of attacks on Indian students in Australia, focus has now shifted to understanding the soft power potential of both India and Australia with an aim to improve bilateral relations. But how much of the perception of the other country is shaped entirely by media reportage could remain debatable.
 
References
Baudrillard, Jean, 1995 (in French 1991), The Gulf war did not take place, translated by Paul Patton, US: Power Institute.
Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,’ Annual Review of Sociology 26: 11-39.
Chalk, Peter, S., 2000, ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's International Organization and Operations -- a preliminary analysis, Commentary no.77,’ Canadian Security Intelligence Service Publication 2000. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/com77e.htm (accessed October 24, 2010).
De Vreese, C. H. (2005). ‘News framing: Theory and typology,’ Information Design Journal + Document Design, 13 (1), 48-59.
Entman, Robert M. 1993. ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,’ Journal of Communication 43 (4): 51-8.
          Entman, Robert M. (2004). Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Iyengar, Shanto, 1987, ‘Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Issues’, American Political Science Review, September 1987.
Jegannathan, Pradeep, 1998, ‘eelam.com: Place, Nation and Imagi-nation in Cyberspace.,’ Public Culture, 1998: 515-528.
Nye, Joseph, 1990, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, NY: Basic Books.
Nye, Joseph, 2004, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, US: Public Affairs.
Nye, Joseph, 2008, Power to lead, NY: Oxford University Press.
Ranganathan, Maya, 2006, Nurturing Nation on the Net: the transmission of nationalist ideologies through Sri Lankan Tamil websites, Working Paper No 6. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute Press, 2006.
Reese, Stephen.D, 2007, ‘The framing project: A bridging model for media research revisited,’ Forum commentary contribution for Journal of Communication special issue on ‘Framing, Agenda-setting and Priming.’
Tankard, James W., Jr., 2001, ‘The Empirical Approach to the Study of Media Framing,’ in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the Social World, (Eds) Stephen D Reese, Oscar H Gandy, and August E Grant. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman, 1981. ‘The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice’, Science 211: 453-458.
Sheridan, Greg, 2009, ‘Asian Democracy and Australia: No Gold Pass to a Trouble-Free Future,’ The Asialink Essays, No. 6, August, Parkville, Asialink Sydney Myer Asia Centre, The University of Melbourne.
Wark, McKenzie, 1994, Virtual Geography, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
 
 
 
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