The Media Game
Robert Kaplan had a great–required– reading–type article in the LA Times last week.
The key graph:
“Iran’s power structure, armed with an admirable Persian gift for subtlety and manipulation, has restricted its own domestic organs of dissent so that it is well positioned to lay siege to media and political elites elsewhere.”
The goal of this massive information operation is to get Iran’s opponents to change their political issues. And they can do it remarkably well because they do not have to worry about pesky reporters, editorialists or oppostion parties.
Open, Western-style governments do not have that luxury.
Western governments have opposition parties who, for electoral gain and occasionally philosophical differences, will snipe at the party in control of foreign policy.
In the case of Iran, groups in the U.S. opposed to the administration’s policies have become an unwitting ally to Ahmadinejad.
Which begs the question–can a Western style democracy outmaneuver a hostile state?
In the current media environment–no.
But if the media would come to understand they are part of the battle field and truly present an unshifting terrain, yes.