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The State Department is hoping that a mix of new technology and old-fashioned emotion will help win the war against terrorism.
After the last World War and until recently, the U.S. government rarely included any emotional content in its press materials, knowing that public relations that pander to emotions are often dismissed as propaganda by the media and general public.
But the Office of International Information Programs' newest venture, a Web-based pictorial documenting life in New York City three months after the attacks, is unabashedly sentimental.
Photos of "Ground Zero" are presented along with the many memorials that still cover the city's streets and buildings. Interspersed with the heart-crunching photos are images of strength and survival -- of a collective life changed but continuing.
"Notice the focus on faces and on children," said photojournalist Steve Adams. "And the focus on Manhattan's multi-ethnic community. This is such an effective way of showing ... people who may think that New Yorkers are all crazed lunatics that people here are just people. Plus, people who aren't fluent in English can still get the point of the material."
Assuming, that is, that they have access to the Internet. Some foreign journalists have charged that the Office of International Information Programs (IIP) isn't developing ways to reach people who do not have access to computers or the Internet.
The IIP's stance is that journalists usually do have Internet access, and can access and then disseminate the information to their local communities.
The IIP is part of the Department of State, the lead U.S. foreign affairs agency. The IIP focuses on communicating U.S. foreign and domestic policy to an international audience, particularly the foreign press, government officials and general public.
According to a representative for the State Department, the IIP is increasingly using technology -- websites, multimedia presentations and electronic newsletters -- to get its message out.
But until recently, agency insiders say the IIP was careful to steer away from an emotional content in its presentations.
"They, as we all did, presented the facts in the very classical and boring news format as if any sign of pandering to peoples' emotions wasn't ethical," said Frank Crispin, a journalist who covered the Central European beat during the Cold War years.
Crispin said that after the Soviet Union dissolved and the Berlin wall came down, America also ceased most of its foreign public relations campaigns.
"The idea was that there wasn't much of a need to reach out and explain the United States anymore," Crispin said. "Military cutbacks were echoed by cutbacks in communications campaigns, too."
The IIP was created from what was left of the U.S. Information Agency when it merged with the Department of State on Oct. 1, 1999. The agency remained active but out of the limelight until recently.
But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided to fight a new kind of war, a battle that included a public relations campaign.
The State Department enlisted the Advertising Council, a New York nonprofit group that creates advertising campaigns for national causes.
Ad Council president and CEO Peggy Conlon said the council received hundreds of phone calls from advertising agencies, media companies and advertisers offering to help get the government's words out to the world.
Another advertising industry veteran, Charlotte Beers, was sworn in as the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs on Oct. 2. Beer headed the IIP's new emotionally charged pitches to the press.
"We are in a battle against disinformation," Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. "Our message is clear, but getting it out in an effective way is our focus now."
Beers showed some of the images that now appear in the New York City memorial gallery at a foreign press briefing on Nov. 9.
"One of the things that strikes me is that as essential as our offices are, our policy statements, our people who speak every day in behalf of the United States policies, these tend to be communications that are extremely reasoned and rational," Beers said, "and yet we know that much of the other side of this argument is intensely emotional and comes from a very different place than ration and reason."
Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Hariri said that he felt that images would be more effective than words, because words are "easier to manufacture."
"People here distrust the political leaders of the United States," Hariri said. "The so-called facts are not always as unchangeable as we would like to think. But the images of memorials seem more real. If nothing else, people seeing them may feel that they have something in common with the people of New York, they may see their own faces mirrored in the faces of the West."
But some members of the foreign media slammed the State Department's plans to make news and information available primarily through the Web.
"You ask why is the message not getting down? Is there a problem with the content of the message, or the way it is delivered?" Adam Ouologuem, vice president of African Correspondents Association, asked at a press briefing. "If (the message) is on the World Wide Web, well, most of these people don't have access to the World Wide Web."
