Abstract
“America is not a subtle nation.” So begins Matt Sienkiewicz’s analysis of the United States’s uncharacteristically quiet attempts to influence Middle Eastern media. Beyond the gorily unsubtle leaflets dropped on Raqqa in 2015 and similar psychological warfare operations, Sienkiewicz reveals a vast patronage network set in place to advance U.S. directives as inconspicuously as possible. Sienkiewicz, an assistant professor of communication and international studies at Boston College, posits that the shaping of forms of media and of market-friendly content has now taken precedence over the overt, top-down promotion of U.S. policy discourse. Analyzing television, radio, and cinematic production in Afghanistan and Palestine, and drawing on extensive fieldwork in both cases, Sienkiewicz traces attempts to reproduce U.S.-style competitive media markets in the Middle East. However, though less emphasis is now placed on micromanaging content in favor of encouraging a competitive business model, the text makes clear that “redlines” and other content constraints are still enforced, mainly through patronage and to lesser extent, through post-production censorship. Sienkiewicz shows how this strategy has evolved through the Cold War, and how, in the calls for greater U.S. investment in Middle Eastern media after 9/11, it has been deployed in its current iteration, “soft-psy,” into the discursive battlegrounds of Palestine and Afghanistan.
“Soft-psy” marks the marriage of U.S. soft power strategy with the military’s psychological warfare operations to describe a “continuum” and “negotiated forms of dominance”: at one end of the spectrum are the ideological points issued as edicts from the United States, and at the other, increased local control and even the possibility of political transgression. The book traces the struggle of local producers as they seek out funding and navigate (or rather, negotiate) various forms of censorship. Moving beyond discussions of cooptation, Sienkiewicz shows how these cultural producers collaborate with the United States while also contesting its aims and pursuing their own. Even in cases where writers or directors are closely monitored and given curricula to follow, clients will play with the established “redlines” by creatively utilizing metaphor, allegory, and intertextuality. The book offers numerous examples where the transcending of U.S.-imposed discursive constraints is tolerated if the transgressions are perceived to be “entrepreneurial in nature.” However, the book holds firm that such subversion of preferred messaging is permitted specifically in the establishing (or, furthering) of U.S. hegemony in the region.
Sienkiewicz gives many examples of producers subverting U.S. discourse (and the emerging avenues of potential subversion), through various means and via every medium available to them, from feature-length cinema to the use of user-generated online videos curated into “meta-media.” On the other hand, the text analyzes programs such as Tolo TV’s Eagle 4, an Afghan adaptation of Fox’s 24, scripted to encourage favorable perceptions of the security apparatus(es), while glorifying technological advantages and legitimizing state violence as necessary for “public safety.” In illustrating the propagandistic potential, as well as the possibilities for discursive subversion of U.S. policy directives, Sienkiewicz attempts a comprehensive account of the adaptability of “soft-psy.” Using female media empowerment as a case study, Sienkiewicz recounts how, although it is a worthwhile endeavor, and despite the postcolonial problematics of Western institutions attempting to “save” Arab women, women’s empowerment has also been used to distract and deflect public attention from other pressing issues. While devoting a full chapter to the issue of gender representation, much more could be said: female empowerment is one issue consistently exploited by states (and particularly autocrats, however liberalized) throughout the world. Furthermore, just as women’s rights can be cynically utilized as a discursive pillar to legitimize the “War on Terror,” so too can they be used to distract from governmental abuses, democratic or otherwise.
Sienkiewicz’s book is a provocative, detailed analysis of the most recent U.S. attempts to weaponize cultural production for political purposes. It draws our attention to an increased emphasis on markets over messaging. In addition, the book draws insights from the implementation of this tactic, not least of which is that viewership does not necessarily translate to profitability. Given the large scope of Sienkiewicz’s corpus there are bound to be areas for further research and development of the concept of “soft-psy.” For example, the book is relatively silent on how those responsible for implementing “soft-psy” strategy do not account for how marketization, privatization, and financialization of media has had terrible ramifications in the United States: the current ubiquity of “alternative facts” testifies to a system of competing media and heteronomizing forces that Pierre Bourdieu outlined in On Television (1998). Rather than a weakness, however, the thought-provoking nature of the text encourages the reader to interrogate its concepts against other contexts and theaters. Indeed, at the end of the book, one suspects that the author may also have more to say on the subject but refrained to be concise. In provoking such questions and by introducing new interpretations of U.S. media strategy in the region, Sienkiewicz’s book is a welcome contribution to the fields of Middle East studies, media and cultural studies, as well as postcolonial studies.