Arab Voices at State

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

It turns out that the state Department's Digital Outreach Team that the New York Times profiled last week has been surfacing on the press's radar for at least six months.

The small team of Arab-speaking members who engage with Arab sites with an anti-US bias, like that of "Uprooted Palestinian Blogger" Sabbah have been raising hackles in the media since March.

That's when Jim Hightower used his perch at the Austin Chronicle to declare the operation Orwellian.

"[Karen] Hughes' office now has an Arabic blog team!" Hightower fumed. "Yes, they're chattering away digitally on Arabic-language blogs to dispel foreign propaganda with ... well, with Bush's propaganda."

What was interesting about the Times' coverage was the assertion that some of the questions raised by the government bloggers (who, by the way do not hide their identities when posting) were not only legitimate (ie, why were the same Arabs outraged over Palestinian deaths mute about the women and children killed by terrorists in Iraq?) but eagerly debated on some of those same sites.

Hightower derided the effort as "fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun," but it seems better than silence. Still, the Times reported, "Some analysts question whether the blog team will survive beyond the tenure of Karen P. Hughes, the confidante of President Bush who runs public diplomacy. The department expects to add seven more team members within the next month -- four more in Arabic, two in Farsi and one in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan."

For better or worse, the Bush administration has been trying to use the internet as a propaganda tool since before the invasion of Iraq. Josh Rushing (with whom I wrote a book about his transition from Marine spokesman to Al Jazeera English correspondent) described getting online at the behest of Rove disciple (and director of media relations in the buildup to the war) Jim Wilkinson and challenging people in chat rooms at sites as varied as Oprah.com and MTV.

"Only later did I realize that my emails must have come across like Big Brother," Rushing said, "especially when I mentioned their name in my reply."

by Sean Elder