Media campaigns cannot substitute for foreign-policy change and breed suspicion when they try

Evidence

Many web posters, along with journalists and academic critics, raised the same crucial question: how could the U.S. government believe that a media campaign would solve problems arising from foreign policy? If the government wants to change opinions about the United States in Muslim countries, this critique went, then the way to do so would be through changing foreign policies. That the media is being used to cover up a policy problem merely garners greater suspicion and animosity toward the United States for presuming an ignorant audience. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1338

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the public-diplomacy literature on credibility gaps: propaganda aimed at audiences presumed ignorant backfires; see the broader field of strategic communication. — connects to: Media-attention-seeking tactics did not change government war policy. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 77