Trust Me, I Speak For Washington …

Have no fear … America’s global imagine is in the hands of … well, hired guns. No, this isn’t a posting about Blackwater.

Neil MacFarquhar reports in the New York Times today that the U.S. State Department has hired a couple of Arabic-speaking bloggers (one from Texas, by the way) to weigh-in on Middle Eastern blogs and forums to provide balance to criticism of U.S. policies. These bloggers are paid of course to deliver carefully scripted messages.

The program is under the watchful eye of Karen Hughes, a former local TV reporter from Texas, who was put in charge of managing America’s image abroad by President Bush.

The tactic of hiring bloggers to manipulate online discussions is not new — PR firms do it all the time in attempts to heighten interest in Hollywood movies, consumer products, popular music and political candidates. But it is a tactic with murky ethical overtones and similar to the practice known as “flogging” or fake blogging.

There is a vastly more credible and transparent alternative approach to build America’s image that doesn’t feel so icky as paid propaganda — it is to enlist, on a non-paid basis, Arabic-speaking bloggers who will genuinely speak out when they see a wrong … who will speak with an authentic voice and from the heart rather than from carefully doctored messages developed by Hughes’ team at the State Department, as described by MacFarquhar. But, I suppose the challenge is to find those people who will lend a hand as volunteers.