Politics and Government

Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies and founder and director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, leads the conversation on media literacy and propaganda. FASKIANOS: Thank you, and welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.   Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.   We are delighted to have Renee Hobbs with us to talk about media literacy and propaganda. Professor Hobbs is founder and director of the Media Education Lab and professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island. Through community and global service as a researcher, teacher, advocate, and media professional she has worked to advance the quality of digital and media literacy education in the United States and around the world. She is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, an open-access peer-reviewed journal that advances scholarship in the field. She’s authored twelve books on media literacy, published over a hundred-fifty articles in scholarly and professional journals, and she was awarded in 2018 the Research Excellence Award from the University of Rhode Island.   So, Renee, I can think of no one better to talk to us about this topic, very important topic, that you’ve been researching and advocating on for over thirty years. So, let’s start by defining media literacy and propaganda and why it is so critical for all of us to deepen our understanding of these topics.   HOBBS: So happy to be here, Irina. Thank you so much for the opportunity and the invitation to a dialogue.   I’ll take about—I’ll take about ten minutes and talk about media literacy defining and propaganda defining, and then we can have a robust and vigorous exchange of ideas. I’m looking forward to questions and comments from everyone who’s joining us today.   Why don’t we start with the phrase media literacy because media literacy is best described as an expanded conceptualization of literacy. So just as we think about literacy as reading and writing, speaking and listening, media literacy includes critical analysis of media and media production.   So to be an effective citizen in an information age, reading and writing and speaking and listening is no longer enough. One has to be skillful at critically analyzing all the different forms and formats and genres that messages now come to us in, and one has to be effective in communicating using media, using digital platforms.   So media literacy is literacy for the twenty-first century. Now, media literacy is sometimes taught in schools and often taught in the home but maybe not taught enough. The best evidence we have in the United States is that about one in three American students gets some exposure to media literacy in their elementary or secondary years, and because of deep investment in media literacy by the European Union, the European Commission, and quite a lot of research work happening in the twenty-eight member states, there is a robust and global community of media literacy educators and they come from very different backgrounds and fields.   They come from psychology, they come from sociology, they come from journalism, they come from education, they come from the humanities, even the fields of art and design. So to be media literate actually includes, if you think about it, a lot of different competencies, not just the ability to fact check, and media literacy isn’t just about news and information because we use media for all kinds of purposes, right, as media inform, entertain, and persuade us. And so media literacy considers media in all its complex functions as part of daily life.   OK. So how about the term “propaganda”?   Irina, this is a much harder word to define and, actually, some people have quibbled with me about my definition of propaganda. But my definition of propaganda is rooted in a deep understanding of the way the term has been used over, well, 400 years now.   In its original formulation propaganda was spreading the Gospel, the good news, as the Catholic Church tried to spread its messages about faith to people around the world. In the twentieth century the term began to be understood as a way to unify people. Propaganda was a way to build consensus for decision making, especially in democratic societies.   And then, of course, during the middle of the twentieth century it took a darker turn as we recognized how Nazi propaganda was used to lead to genocide, right, to destroy—to attempt to destroy and to create mass murder. So the word propaganda is kind of loaded with that twentieth century history.   But, yet, when we lived through the pandemic—here you are. You lived through it, didn’t you? (Laughs.) You lived through the pandemic because you got exposed to what I would call beneficial propaganda—propaganda that told you to wear a mask, propaganda that told you to get vaccinated, propaganda that said use social distancing.   So to understand propaganda and all its complexities we could say propaganda is communication designed to influence behavior, attitudes, and values, and propaganda is a form of mass communication, right.   So it isn’t persuasion that just happens, you know, you and me deciding, you know, should we go for pizza or Chinese for dinner tonight, right. I’ll try to persuade you. You try to persuade me. When we do it to large numbers of people and we use mediated symbols we’re engaging in propaganda.   So propaganda is a really important concept. Its meaning is situational and contextual, which is why when I work with students I often talk about how our understanding of propaganda is inflected by our cultural histories.   So, for instance, when I’m working with educators in Croatia, having had a long history of influence in the Soviet and, you know, in the communist era, their understanding of propaganda is inflected by the exposure to state-disseminated messages. And so the meaning of propaganda in your country and your cultural context might differ.   In Brazil, Irina, the word propaganda just means advertising, right, and advertising is a type of propaganda. Diplomacy can be a form of propaganda. The actions of government, politicians, can be a form of propaganda, but so can entertainment function as propaganda and so can education.   So propaganda is a really rich concept. Why is it important? Why is it important that we use media literacy skills like asking critical questions about media with propaganda?   Well, because propaganda tries to influence us by bypassing our critical thinking and the best way that propaganda has tried to change our behavior and influence our attitudes is by activating strong emotions, simplifying information, appealing to our deepest hopes, fears, and dreams, and attacking opponents, and these four mechanisms of propaganda can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.   So we are vulnerable to the terrible side of propaganda if we aren’t vigilant.   FASKIANOS: Fascinating. So in terms of the literacy how are you teaching this? Are you teaching students how to discern between the propaganda that is the good propaganda and, I mean, what—how do you make that distinction?   HOBBS: Got it. So students—propaganda—there’s a bunch of big ideas about propaganda that are really useful to understand. One is propaganda is in the eye of the beholder. So I don’t try—I don’t tell students what’s propaganda and what’s information, right. I encourage students to engage in a process of asking critical questions to come to their own conclusions about that.  And just want to show you one tool I use, Irina, in my teaching, I call it the media literacy smart phone. I’m going to show it to you a little bit so you can see it. The smart phone has some buttons on it that invite you to ask these questions like this one. Reality check—what is accurate or inaccurate about this message? That’s a good question to ask when you’re trying to determine whether something is harmful or beneficial propaganda.   Or how about this one? Public gain or private good—who’s making money from this message? Answer that question and you can often gain insight on the difference between harmful propaganda and beneficial propaganda.   Or how about this one? What’s left out? You know, the best way to spot propaganda is to notice what’s missing, right, because all media messages have a point of view, right. All media messages are selective and incomplete. So to identify the point of view of a media message notice what’s missing, what’s not being said, what’s left out.  There’s the values check button, the read between the lines button, the stereotype alert button. Propaganda often uses stereotypes to create in groups and out groups. If you’re in the in group propaganda feels really good—(laughter)—and if you’re in the out group you are being painted as an enemy, a villain, a dangerous person. Solution’s too easy. And record—save for later, you know, with the world we live in where we’re constantly swiping, clicking, we’re devoting only a few seconds to media messages because we’re moving so fast through so many of them.   This button reminds us that we actually have to make choices about what to pay attention to, what to allocate our attention to, and that means we sometimes have to slow down, right. So learning to allocate your attention and decide which messages deserve your attention and which messages don’t, these are all media literacy competencies.   So we aren’t telling people what to think, right. We aren’t—we aren’t naming that’s misinformation, that’s malinformation. We don’t do any of that. What we do is invite people to ask critical questions like who’s the author and what’s the purpose? What techniques are used to attract and hold your attention? How might different people interpret this message differently? What’s omitted? What are the values presented?  We want people to think for themselves because media literacy is a literacy practice and when people have these habits of mind built in, when they use them automatically when they’re reading the news, when they’re being persuaded, when they’re being entertained, then this goes back to the Enlightenment, Irina. We trust that people can differentiate between quality and junk, right, when they put the cognitive effort, when they’re effortful and strategic. And this kind of work can’t be done by yourself. It has to be done with others.   I mean, think about that question, how might different people interpret the message differently. This is why discussion and dialogue are so critically important to analyzing propaganda and to developing media literacy competencies.   FASKIANOS: Great. Fascinating.   Let’s go to questions to the group. We already have a few in the chat. You can also raise your hand and I will go back and forth between. If you do write your question in the chat or the Q&A box, please tell us who you are.   So I’m going to go to the first question from Andrew Jones, who’s an assistant professor of communications at Davis & Elkins College in Virginia. Would you draw a distinction between propaganda and public relations or do you see the two terms as interchangeable?   HOBBS: Ha ha, great question. Of course, I’ve had vigorous discussions about this in—with my students and with my colleagues. In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda and it became a classic in the field of communication. He very quickly recognized that the term propaganda was so negatively loaded that he changed the name to Public Relations.   So the grandfather of public relations understood that the word propaganda and public relations are, I would say, kissing cousins. So I don’t generally differentiate because I like—I think there’s a lot of utility to using the word propaganda in its big tent meaning, right.   So we—what we don’t want to do is just have propaganda be used as a smear word. That’s the term Neil Postman talked about when he said, you know, that’s a shortcut to critical thinking, right. By labeling something propaganda or, i.e., bad now you don’t have to think about it. Now you don’t have to ask critical questions, right.   So we want people to—we want to do whatever we can to make people think. So advertising can be a form of propaganda, right, and education can be a form of propaganda and entertainment can be a form of propaganda, and to determine whether you think it’s propaganda or not you really have to look very carefully at the form, the context, the audience, the purpose.   You have to really look at the whole rhetorical situation, make that determination yourself. What do you think? Is propaganda and public relations the same or are they different?   FASKIANOS: OK. People are not raising their hand but they’re writing their questions. So the next question is from Chip Pitts, who’s a lecturer at Stanford University, and it kind of follows on to what we were just talking about, to distinguish between propaganda and truth or falsity if that distinguish is important.   HOBBS: Oh, that’s a great question. This goes back to the earliest definitions of the term propaganda when it has long been recognized even at the very beginning of the First—when the First World War happened and propaganda really was becoming a tool used by governments, right, recognized that propaganda works best when it uses truth, right.  So propaganda can use truthful information, half-truths, or lies and, of course Goebbels was famous for saying that the best propaganda is truthful, right. (Laughs.) So propaganda can be truthful and very, very dangerous, right. Very harmful.   And so I think it’s important to recognize that propagandists use—can use truth, half-truths, or lies.   FASKIANOS: Yeah. So how do you, though, distinguish or have people, if you’re not telling people—you know, you’re teaching students how to think critically, which is so important. But as we saw with January 6 there is a subset of people who do not call it an insurrection.  HOBBS: Right.  FASKIANOS: You know, so we do have different groups that have—are using a different basis—set of facts. So what do you do in that case?   HOBBS: So media literacy is really rooted in this idea that we are co-learners in the search for truth and that none of us have a handle on it completely and we all need each other to apprise the complexity of what’s going on in the world.   So dialogue and discussion becomes a really central pedagogy of media literacy with this idea that we want to engage with each other with—from a position of intellectual humility. When I come into the classroom and I decide you can only call it an insurrection and if you call it a riot there’s something wrong with you, then I’ve created an in group and an out group, haven’t I? And I’ve set up a hierarchy that says if you agree with me you’re right and if you don’t agree with me you’re wrong. I can’t really have a discussion, can I?   That discussion is going to be false or artificial. It’s going to be stilted. Some people are going to be silenced in a discussion where I set the terms of what truth is, and that’s the very phenomenon we’re trying to fight against, right.   But if I come in with these critical questions and put you in the position of having to say how are they grabbing my attention, what is true, what seems accurate and inaccurate, how are stereotypes being used, right, then you have to engage in some genuine thinking.   And so teachers take—in that position don’t take—choose to take—choose not to take the position of an authority telling people what to think but, really, as a co-learner guiding with critical questions for students to come to their own conclusions about that.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm. That’s great. All right.   So we do have a raised hand. I’m going to go to Beverly Lindsay. And, Beverly, if you could tell us who you are—I know who you are, but for the group.   Q: I’m Beverly Lindsay, University of California multi-campus.   I spent a number of years working in the Department of State, in particular the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and I’m still doing some funded programs from them. And years afterwards I was able to speak with the late Secretary of State Dean Rusk. I wasn’t in the State Department when he was there so we’re talking about a more recent period.   One of the statements that he made to me was the best propaganda has no propagandistic values. Years later when I was an international dean at a former university the executive vice president and the provost said to me, because this is a university wide program, that getting a Fulbright was simply propaganda in developing countries.   So you had two different views from two knowledgeable people. How would you think we might think about those type of responses now? He valued the—if you got a Fulbright to Oxford?  HOBBS: I really love this question, Beverly, and I actually do—I do something on this with my students as we look at the Voice of America, right, and we look at, well, this is journalism, right, and it’s journalism that’s designed to bring diverse perspectives on world issues to people in countries where they may not have this kind of journalism and, at the same time, there is a distinctly American ideology to this kind of journalism, right.   And so there’s a very interesting way in which maybe both of those ideas, maybe both of those frames that you just presented to us, maybe both of them are true, right. And I feel like it’s quite liberating to acknowledge that there’s some truth in both of those ideas, right, that the best diplomacy doesn’t have a propaganda intent and that soft power in whatever form it takes is strategic and intentional and it’s designed to accomplish a policy objective.   FASKIANOS: Great. So I’m going to take the next question written. Oh, Beverly has raised her hand. So I think there’s a follow-on before I go to the next one.   Beverly, do you want to follow up? You’re still muted.   Q: Sorry. If someone has a Fulbright to University College London or Oxford or one of the redbrick universities in the United Kingdom why would that not be propaganda in one country and not in another? Are we assuming that the people in England are more sophisticated?   HOBBS: Hmm. I like—I can’t speak to the specifics of that situation but I do think that one of the reasons why we say that propaganda is in the eye of the beholder is that meaning is not in texts. Meaning is in people, right. So as we humans try to use symbols to communicate and express ourselves, right, there’s slippage—(laughs)—right, between the meaning I’m encoding as I’m using language and words right now, right, and the meaning that you’re interpreting, because I’m making my choices based on my cultural context and you’re making meaning based on your cultural context.   So that humility, the humility of recognizing that we’re imperfect meaning makers, let’s be in a position where, again, both points of view might have validity, and one of the pedagogies that we try to emphasize in media literacy is listening with genuine curiosity and asking good faith questions with genuine curiosity is more generative of learning than asking questions or using questioning as a mechanism of attack, right.   And so we can see in our public discourse right now that we all are—we all have learned very well, right, how to weaponize information, right—(laughs)—how to use it for powerful purposes. But when we’re talking about education we adapt this stance of being open to the multiple interpretations that exist in any given context. So that’s the only way I can respond to that question.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to go next to Asha Rangappa, who’s a senior lecturer at Yale.   It seems that the question is source and intention, not truth. Russia can say something that is true, but if they do it by covering up that they are the source of that content—black propaganda—with the intention of causing division and chaos, that’s still propaganda. So can you talk about how Russia is using propaganda in the war—in their war with Ukraine?  HOBBS: Oh, absolutely. What a great question and thank you so much for pointing out a very, very important—there’s two really important ideas in your question that I want to just underline and amplify.   One is that to be critical thinkers about propaganda the first question we want to ask is who’s the author and what’s the purpose. So many propagandists try to disguise that authorship, right, and there are so many ways to do that.   It’s so easy to disguise your identity. You can use a technique called astroturfing, which is you can set up a nonprofit organization, give it a little bit of money, and it sends out the message, right, and you, the company or government, whatever you are, you have some distance from it.   There’s, of course, sponsored content. It looks like it’s news but it’s really funded. It’s really propaganda. It’s really a form of—it’s an influence operation. So the first thing we want to try to do whenever we can is figure out who made the message and what is the purpose, and that’s why your second point is so, so important and I want to amplify this idea, this question about intentionality—what’s the author’s purpose.   But there’s something complicated about that, too, which is that intentionality is fundamentally unknowable. (Laughs.) I mean, we can make inferences about intentionality. But that’s what they are. They’re inferences.   Now, that being said, of course, we definitely see the very many and very creative ways that Russia has been active in creating and stoking and leveraging in groups and out groups to deepen divisiveness in this country and all around the world and in Ukraine and well before even the invasion of Crimea.   The Ukrainians were very much tuned into this and some of the best work happening in media literacy education was happening in Ukraine even before Crimea because they were so clearly aware of how propaganda was being used to create division between Ukrainians.   So this is partly why one of the things we want to help students recognize is how in group and out group identities can be amplified or weaponized through the power of language, right, the words we use to describe others, right, through the power of symbols and metaphors, and this goes all the way back to George Orwell in the 1930s, who wrote brilliantly about propaganda, and said basically every time humans open their mouths they’re persuading, right—(laughs)—by the very word you choose, right.   Irina, you chose insurrection. I chose riot. In the very choice of language we’ve got a point of view there, right.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm.  HOBBS: As we have, like, heightened consciousness about that then that really helps us recognize the very subtle forms that propaganda can take, and I think in the case of the Russian propaganda we see some brilliantly devious and terrible ways that propaganda was used to divide Americans and to polarize, and the polarization that we’re now experiencing in our country was created intentionally and strategically and is still being created intentionally and specifically by a whole bunch of different actions, not actors, not just foreign agents, I might add.   FASKIANOS: OK. So I am going to Holley Hansen, who is a teaching assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at Oklahoma State University, asks even if people are able to teach media literacy techniques to people how do you counter the impact of the algorithms in social media, especially when they seem to reward extremist messages?   HOBBS: Yeah. Great question, and this is absolutely huge. It’s why the media literacy community is really working hard on a concept we call algorithm literacy, right, which is understanding how increasingly the messages that are in your media environment are tailored in ways that reinforce your prejudices, reinforce your beliefs.  There’s a lot of really cool activities that you can do with this. We have—there’s lesson plans and materials, resources, on the—on our website at MediaEducationLab.com. But, you know, my Google is not your Google and my Facebook is not your Facebook.   So one activity that I always do at the beginning of every semester with my students is I have them—we have some—certain keywords that we might use. Like, we might put in country names like Finland, Slovenia, the Philippines, and now take a screenshot of what comes up on your Google, and my students—within the group of thirty students my students will have different results on Google and then they’ll be able to sort of unpack how their Google has been trained by them, right, algorithmically to present them with some results and to deny them some other results.   This is a big a-ha for students and I think for all of us we’re—it’s so easy for us not to be aware. Again, we tend not to notice what we don’t see, right. So we aren’t even aware often of how our—how algorithmic bias is influencing our worldview. That’s another reason why media literacy educators insist on using dialogue and discussion and why increasingly educators are bringing people together using the power of Zoom technology from different regions of the country, different states.   So my colleague Wes Fryer in Oklahoma is working with middle school students in New Jersey to bring Oklahoma middle school students and New Jersey middle school students together to have dialogue and discussion because we—the algorithmic biases are not—they are not just limited to individuals. They also exist within community context and cultural milieus as well.   FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go to Serena Newberry, who’s raised—has a raised hand.   Q: Hello. I’m Serena Newberry. I’m a Schwarzman scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  And somewhat building upon the previous question on Russia-Ukraine propaganda in addition to the critical thinking questions that you mentioned earlier, how would we go about separating propaganda attached to existing institutions, be it an organization or a country, when there is bias attached to that nation or institution?  For example, you mentioned that the author changed the name of the book Propaganda to Public Relations because rather than trying to convince people of using their critical thinking skills that word had so many negative connotations attached to it. So how do we go about that when trying to move forward in foreign relations and building bridges in other ways?   HOBBS: Yeah. That’s a really great question and I’ll tell you my China story.  I had the opportunity to go teach students media literacy in China on several occasions now and the word propaganda is very complicated in that country, right. (Laughs.)   And so we came to the conclusion that understanding media messages in all their many forms was something that required people to evaluate different levels of—different levels of trust and trustworthiness and that whether—what you called it was less important. What the label is was less important than the reasoning process that you use to make sense of it.   In China it’s called moral education, right, and it’s done in schools and it’s a way to create patriotic values, to disseminate patriotic values, and in the United States when I got taught I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States that was also a form of moral education, patriotic education as it were, right.  And so I wouldn’t call that propaganda but I could see how someone might. And so I think it doesn’t matter what we call it. It matters that—what reasoning process and what evidence we use, what critical thinking skills we activate, in a dialogue and discussion.   FASKIANOS: So, John Gentry, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, has a question that also got an up vote—two up votes.   As I’m sure you know, the Soviets and then the Russians developed sophisticated propaganda mechanisms by what they called disinformation and active measures. They developed a doctrine known as reflective control designed to induce targets to make ostensibly independent decisions consistent with their interests.   How do you propose that targets identify and defend against such devices?   HOBBS: Wow. Yeah. That’s really a hard question because what is powerful about that framing is the way in which it is systemic, right, and that framing actually is really useful in understanding why people don’t act in their own best interest—(laughs)—right, sometimes—why sometimes people don’t act in their own best interests, right.   So I—what I appreciate about that observation, and this is—you’re acknowledging the way that sociologists have recognized that when propaganda is used in that way, systemic—in that systemic way it becomes actually really difficult or maybe even impossible for individuals to kind of work their way out of it or through it.  I think Jacques Ellul he defined—his framing for that—he called it sociological propaganda because of his sense that you couldn’t see the forest for the trees. So I think both the Russian framing of active measures and the way in which a whole worldview can be cultivated, right, that creates reality for people, and I think that’s partly why we value—we so much value freedom of speech and free markets as ways to protect us from the kind of abuses of power that are possible in more totalitarian or autocratic societies.   I think that’s why we so—we’re seeing countries, you know, sort of recognize and resist autocratic policies that allow one view of reality to be promulgated and all other interpretations of reality to be denied.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm. OK. So let’s go to Raj Bhala, who has raised hand.   Q: Thank you, and thank you for this wonderful presentation. So thought provoking.   So I’m asking you as a friendly member of the tenured professoriate like you, are we agents of propaganda, too? I have a new book coming out on the Sino-American trade war and I’ve often wondered have I fallen victim in researching and writing to propaganda from both sides. And, more generally, as you probably know from, you know, our careers, in our scholarship, in our teaching, in who we promote for tenure, the way we review their articles, are we also propagandists and even more so as universities get evermore corporatized with budget cuts?  HOBBS: Wow. What a—  FASKIANOS: And Raj is at the University of Kansas.  HOBBS: Raj, that is—thank you for asking that really, really great question, and this is a great opportunity to acknowledge the important work on propaganda done by Noam Chomsky at MIT, and in his book Manufacturing Consent he said that the information elites, and by that he meant the 20 percent of us who are knowledge workers and work in knowledge industries, he said we’re the ones who are most deeply indoctrinated into a system, an ideological system where propaganda—propagandists work their hardest on us and they don’t bother with the others because if they get us then they get the control. The control is embodied.   So I do think it’s very self-aware and reflective for all of us knowledge workers to be aware of how our own world view and understanding of the world has been shaped through communication—through communication and information—and the stance of intellectual humility is most urgent because—well, I think we’ve seen all around us the dangers of righteousness. What happens when you become too certain that your view of reality is the only view of reality, right? Well, bad things happen, right. (Laughs.) Bad things happen when you become too sure of yourself, too righteous, because you close yourself off to other ways of knowing and other sources of information and other points of view that may be mostly false but have a glimmer of truth in them and that’s the piece of truth you actually need to solve the puzzle, moving forward.   So the problem of righteousness, the danger of righteousness, is something that everyone working in the knowledge industries needs to be aware of and the stance of intellectual humility is so hard because we’re experts, right.  So it’s one of those things that we have to call each other out on and call each other into, right. Come into a place where we can accept that we might have a piece of—we might understand a piece of this complex problem but not all of it.   And my guess is, Raj, that in your writing and in your scholarship you adopt that stance of intellectual humility and that helps your readers recognize you’re offering them something but you’re aware that you don’t have the whole story, because that’s what we do, right, and that’s how we help each other to come closer to the truth.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take a written question from Skyler Ruderman, who’s at University of California Santa Cruz.   How do we start investigating internal propaganda when it is so thoroughly and casually disseminated throughout American mass culture and media, for example, the Department of Defense having oversight and script rewriting authority on movie production if the producers want to use military equipment or the ways twenty years ago consent was heavily manufactured with bipartisan support for the Iraq war in the major news outlets?   These things are easily written off, much like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, as patriotic or nationalistic. So where do we start?   HOBBS: Wow. What a great—what a great question. Can I share my screen, Irina? Is that possible?  FASKIANOS: You should be able to. We’ll turn—  HOBBS: I should be able to share my screen. Let’s see.   FASKIANOS: There you go.   HOBBS: Can you see my screen right now?   FASKIANOS: We can.   HOBBS: I want to show you two resources that I think are really helpful for broadening our understanding of propaganda in just the ways that your question proposes.   One is: go explore my online learning modules on propaganda and check out propaganda in entertainment, right, or memes as propaganda, election propaganda, conspiracy theories, algorithmic personalization, and even art and activism as propaganda.   And then—let’s see if I can go back up here—and then go check out the Mind Over Media gallery. When I first started teaching about propaganda I was aware that my students live in a different media world than I do, right. I encounter some kinds of media and my students encounter different kinds of media because of what we talked about before—algorithmic personalization and this just gigantic flood of content that we get exposed to as creators and consumers.   So what I did was I created a tool that makes it possible for anyone anywhere in the world to upload examples of contemporary propaganda or what people think is examples of contemporary propaganda, and because I got some funding from the European Commission to do this work I have propaganda from a bunch of different countries and right now at the top of the list are these kinds of examples of different kinds of propaganda and, you know, some of them are really weird.   Like, for instance, this one, right. The person who uploaded this meme—the meme reads, for those of you who are not seeing the screen, remember when politics attracted the brightest and most intelligent—what the hell happened, right, and it’s got some pictures of politicians.   This person thinks this is propaganda because it attacks opponents and it attacks people who are Republican and it shows that Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington were good. However, it shows Trump as one who’s not very intellectual. And so some student uploaded this and I’m invited to rate this example, do I think this is beneficial or harmful. I think this is probably a little bit—no, I’m not sure how I feel. I’m going to be right in the middle here.   But take a look at the results, Irina. Twenty-seven percent of the people who’ve been to the website say they thought this propaganda was beneficial, 14 percent thought it was harmful, and then most of us are in the middle here. So it turns out that, in some ways, there is an opportunity to examine the stories we tell of the past and how they shape our understanding of the present day.   I’ve been doing that through recovering how propaganda used to be taught in the 1920s and ’30s in the years leading up to World War II as American educators began to be concerned about demagogues like Father McCoughlin (sic; Coughlin) on the radio, right, and the way in which the power of the voice coming—when the voice came into your living room it was a very powerful experience. It was so intimate. It was so personal. It had such an emotional power. And we realized that every generation has to address the emotional power of propaganda because the propaganda that you carry on your digital device, right, has got its own unique ways of bypassing your critical thinking and activating your emotions in ways that can be really, really dangerous.   FASKIANOS: So what would you say about TikTok?   HOBBS: Well, I’ve been fascinated. We’ve been using TikTok a lot in our education outreach initiatives and the project that I’m working on right now is called Courageous Rhode Island. It’s a federally funded project from the Department of Homeland Security and we’re using media literacy as a violence prevention tool to address the issues of domestic extremism, right.   And so we’ve been looking at TikTok videos that on the surface seem, well, quite entertaining. But then when you spend time, actually watching it—you watch it twice, right, and you start asking those critical questions that I shared with you earlier, then you really discover it’s, like, oh my gosh, this thing actually has a white nationalism agenda or an anti-trans agenda or a(n) anti—or a misogynistic worldview or an anti-Semitic worldview. But at first viewing it just looked like fun.   So we think it’s really important to take—to help slow down our encounter with TikTok, and when adults do that with teenagers and when teenagers do that with each other and when young adults do that with people of different ages it can be a mind-blowing learning experience.  And participants who are here in this call can join us on this journey. Every two weeks we have what we call courageous conversations. The next one’s coming up on April 4 and it’s called “High Conflict.” We’re talking about the media messages that put us into conflict with each other and what we can do about them. So TikTok’s one of those medium that can incite high conflict.   FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question from Pyonhong Yin (ph) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Q: Hi. Can you hear me?   HOBBS: Yeah.   Q: Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your very interesting talk.   So I am a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Illinois and I’m currently working on a paper about the propaganda during the international conflict, and I just got a question from two professors in a different field in political science and they asked me whether—or do you think propaganda is costly.  Like, so because I think during the conflict the leaders they—you know, the people—they usually make some very aggressive statements, right, and sometimes they might make some empty threats. So, to me, I think it’s costly because if they do not follow their words then, you know, the public—the majority of the people they do not trust the leaders. But, yeah, but I—yeah, so this is the—just the question. Yeah. So do you think the propaganda is costly?   HOBBS: So that’s interesting how you’re using the phrase costly, right. The idea is does—you’re asking, in a way, what are the consequences of the use of propaganda, right, and I think it’s a really important question because, remember, propaganda can be used to unify, right. So propaganda can be a vehicle that people use to create consensus in a group, right, and that’s—coming to consensus is part of the democratic process, right.  That’s how we—we come to consensus because it’s an essential way of solving problems nonviolently. But as you’re using the term costly you’re imagining a person, a propagandist, who says one thing in one context for one audience and one goal and maybe has to walk that back in a different context or at a different time period, and then that may have a cost because people may lower—the trust might be lowered, and I think that’s actually, like, a very important calculus that politicians have to consider in their use of propaganda.   So I really appreciate the idea of the kind of—almost like the mathematical or the financial metaphor that’s behind your question. There is a cost because the cost is trust can be increased or reduced, right, and from a politician’s point of view that’s currency, right. That has real value.   But we often focus on propaganda that diminishes trust. I want to make sure that we don’t forget that propaganda can increase trust, right. So it works both ways—the cost and the costliness. And you can learn more about this in my book. I’m putting up a link to my book in the chat, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age.   I think one way to interrogate the cost issues is to look at different agents of propaganda. Look, for example, at how activists use propaganda. For instance, Greta Thunberg, the world’s youngest and most important environmental propagandist, right. She’s been very skillful in using her language, her imagery, her messaging, to increase her credibility, right, and to—and she’s very aware of how at certain times certain messages might have a cost, and we can go back and look at the history of her speeches and see when she’s made some mistakes, right—when her messages had a cost, right, that weakened her credibility.   And so I think being strategic—looking at that—looking at propagandists’ choices and the cost or the consequences or the potential impacts, very interesting strategy. So great question. Very thought-provoking question around that metaphor. Thank you.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take a question from Oshin Bista, who’s a graduate student at Columbia University: What are your thoughts on the tensions/overlaps between approaching information with generous curiosity and the inaccessibility of the languages of media? How do we make this form of literacy accessible?   HOBBS: Great, great question. You know, the reason why that’s such a good question is because there is a vocabulary that has to be learned, right. To critically analyze news as propaganda there’s a whole lot of words you need to know—(laughs)—right. There’s a whole lot of genres that you need to know, right, and that knowledge, for instance, about the knowledge about the economics of news. To understand propaganda as it exists in journalism you have to understand the business model of journalism, right, why likes and clicks and subscriptions and popularity are a form of currency in the business, right.  So how to make that more accessible? I think actually journalists and media professionals can go a long way and one of the groups that I’m paying special attention to are the YouTube influencers who are doing this work through messages that are entertaining and informational and persuasive.   For example, check out Tiffany Ferguson and her internet education series. She’s a twenty-three-year-old college—recent college graduate who’s been helping her audience, mostly teenage girls, I would say—helping her audience learn to critically analyze all different aspects of internet culture, right.  That is a great example of somebody who’s using their power as a communicator to help their audience be better informed and make better choices, and I feel like a lot of media professionals can play that role in society.   In fact, another good example of that is Hank and John Green, the quintessential YouTubers, right. So I think media professionals are really well poised to bring media literacy knowledge and concepts to mass audiences and that’s why they’re a vital part of the media literacy movement globally. Not just here in the United States but all over the world.   FASKIANOS: So we’re seeing in Congress, you know, Congress taking on TikTok and wanting to ban it, and Chip has—Chip Pitts of Stanford has a follow-up question: Beyond education for media literacy, what laws, regulations, norms can our government and others deploy to help control the worst harms—required content moderation, you know, applied young international human rights standards versus U.S.-style free speech, et cetera? So what is your feeling on that?   HOBBS: Yeah. Great question. Of course, we’re always—we’re often asked—some people think that media literacy is a substitute for government regulation. But we’re always very attentive to say, well, our interest is in focusing on what media consumers need to know and be able to do.   That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for regulation and, for example, I think one of the easy to document positive impacts of media regulation is the GDPR regulation, right, that Germany enacted. That actually—that benefited the entire world, right.   And so the question about content moderation and Section 230 and the appropriate ways to regulate social media these are complex issues that people—that we can’t solve that in two seconds and we, certainly, can’t solve it globally because we can’t.   But we can think about how different countries around the world, as they implement social media regulation, it becomes like little laboratories. Let’s—so as countries pass laws about social media let’s see what happens, right. Let’s see what the results are culturally, politically. Let’s see what the benefits of that regulation and let’s see what some of the unintended consequences might be.   So that’s the only way that we’ll design regulation that accomplishes its beneficial goals without its unintended consequences. So I’m kind of happy that states like California are regulating social media now, right. That’s awesome to see little laboratories of experimentation.   But I’m not prepared to tell you what I think the best approach to regulation is. I think we just need to be attentive to the fact that regulation will be part of the solution in minimizing the harms of communication in the public sphere.   FASKIANOS: Well, unfortunately, we have to end here because we’re out of time, and we have so many more questions and comments. I’m sorry that we could not get to you all.   We will send out the link to this webinar so you can watch it again as well as links to Renee’s book, to her community conversations. I see it, “Courageous.” I have it up on my screen now for the “High Conflict” event on April 4, and anything else, Renee, that you think. I especially love the questions that you showed us on your phone. I want to get those so I can share them with my family.  So thank you for being with us and for all of your great questions and comments. Appreciate it.   The last Academic Webinar of the semester will be on Wednesday, April 12, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. So please do join us for that. We’ll send out the invitation under separate cover.  And I just want to flag for you all that we have CFR-paid internships for students and fellowships for professors. If you go to CFR.org/careers you can find the information there, and you do not have to be in New York or DC. You can be remote, virtual. They’re great opportunities for students even if you are not in one of these two cities.   Please follow us at @CFR_Academic and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues.   Again, Renee Hobbs, thank you so much for this conversation, your research. We really appreciate it and look forward to continuing to follow the really tremendous work that you’re doing.   HOBBS: Thank you so much for the opportunity, Irina. I really enjoyed talking with everybody today. Bye now.   FASKIANOS: Bye-bye.   (END) 

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco discusses how the Department of Justice is countering new and evolving threats to the rule of law posed by hostile nation states, from transnational repression to foreign malign influence. This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

CFR President Richard Haass leads a conversation on expanding the idea of citizenship and ensuring the survival of American democracy. His new book, The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens, is a guide for elected officials, government staffers, and their constituents across the political spectrum to heal divisions and safeguard our country’s future.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We are delighted to have participants from forty-eight U.S. states and territories with us for today’s discussion, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on domestic and international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. We are pleased to have CFR President Richard Haass with us to discuss citizenship, civic responsibilities, and how to protect the future of American democracy. You have his full bio, so I will be brief. Dr. Haass is in his twentieth year as president of CFR. He has served as special assistant and senior Middle East advisor to President George H.W. Bush, and held various positions in the Defense and State Departments during the Carter and Reagan administrations. He is the author or editor of fourteen books on U.S. foreign policy, one book on management, and his most recent book on American democracy entitled The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits for Good Citizens. Richard, thanks for being with us. Thank you for creating this initiative for state and local officials. If you could begin by giving us an overview of your book and more specifically why the focus on obligations rather than our rights. HAASS: Well, first of all, Irina, I’d like to know what are the two states not represented in this call. Clearly, you’re not doing your job. That’s very upsetting. Second of all, I want to thank everybody for what they do day in, day out. I’m a great believer in public service. I worked on the Hill and I was lucky enough for work to work for four different presidents. I also have some sense of what public service demands and requires. So thank you, again, for what you are doing, and thank you for giving us this hour here today. I wrote this book about democracy, putting obligations at the center. Just want to clarify for the record it doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with rights; of course I am. Rights are central to the American experiment. Indeed, as I expect all of you know, we only got the Constitution ratified when the Bill of Rights was added. Several states conditioned their ratification of the proposed Constitution on the adoption of a Bill of Rights. The reason is the entire context was still, you know, the breakaway from Britain, I mean, was still fresh in people’s minds, and the contrast between the totally or woefully inadequate Articles of Confederation and the new Constitution was great. And quite a few people were worried that the contrast was too great and we were creating too powerful a federal government, too powerful of an executive. Hence, the emphasis on rights. And again, rights and freedoms are fundamental to this or any democracy. And, you know, again, just so you don’t think I’m not concerned about rights, you know, what Lincoln described as our unfinished work remains unfinished. The reality with rights doesn’t always match up, say, to the Declaration of Independence—which, by the way, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of which in three years. But even if somehow we were able to close that gap and we no longer had any issues with—essentially, if Lincoln’s unfinished work were to become finished, it still wouldn’t be enough for American democracy. Think about it. You know, rights inevitably come into conflict with one another—a mother’s right to choose versus the rights of the unborn; someone’s rights to acquire arms under the Second Amendment versus someone else’s right to public safety; the right not to get immunized or wear a mask versus the right to health and so forth, public health. And so, again, rights alone do not provide the basis for a functioning government. Former Justice Breyer, Steve Breyer, wrote thoughtfully that the toughest cases and the most important cases that came before the Court—before the highest court—were not rights versus wrongs, but were rights versus rights. And when you have rights clashing, in the absence of compromise one of two things tends to happen. One is you either tend to have gridlock. You know, we’ve seen an awful lot of that. Or, worse yet, things have the potential to generate into violence, particularly if it becomes an all-or-nothing situation and the side that comes away with nothing, or comes away with what they believe to be too little, they then feel that the system doesn’t offer them enough and they’re prepared to go outside the system. And that’s the road to ruin and the road to violence. So I’ve argued for rights in two contexts. One is what we all owe one another and the other is what we all owe to this country—to the government and to the nation—as a way of not substituting for rights but complementing them, almost two sides of the citizenship coin. We need rights. We need obligations. And American democracy will only realize its potential if both sides of the coin are developed. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Richard. So we have a diverse group of state and local officials on this call. What role do they play in encouraging the kind of citizen participation that you put forward in your book? HAASS: Well, all of them—all of you directly or indirectly are where you are because of citizen participation. Either you were voted for directly or you were appointed by someone, I expect, who was. So participation is essential to democracy. Ideally, it will be informed participation. It was Ronald Reagan—I think it was his farewell address—who argued not simply for patriotism, but for informed patriotism, very much in this—in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, who wanted informed citizens. And that would be the way to hold elected and appointed officials accountable. That would be the basis for people understanding when they were to exercise the right to vote how to exercise it in a way—in a manner that would be in the best interest of the country, as well as their ow personal best interest. So one thing I believe that people in public life have a right—I mean, have an obligation to do is to promote civic participation. We can talk about it in detail, but among other things the right to—the right to vote. I believe the right to vote should be readily exercisable. Obviously, there has to be integrity, but also I believe there has to—voting should not be, you know, made difficult with hurdles that are not, I believe, germane to the integrity of the—of the process. I think people in public life can model certain behaviors that are essential to a democracy. One is compromise, which is essential, as you all know better than I do, to get things done. Civility; people in public life can model civility. It also turns out to be pretty practical. Again, I feel a little bit like I’m preaching to the converted here. It’s taking those coals to Newcastle. But you know, the person you’re disagreeing with today—which is Thursday—on one issue might be the person you need to work with tomorrow on a totally separate issue. So civility—or—incivility tends not to be persuasive. Plus, it can—it can poison a relationship, so even when there is a potential for getting something done together that potential has been eliminated. I think people in public life have the obligation to reject violence for political ends. I think they have the obligation to respect norms. You know, one of the most fundamental is conceding when one loses an election, the so-called peaceful transfer of power. It’s at the core of the legitimacy of democratic systems. Again, you’re part of government service, so by doing what you’re doing you’re generating or modeling respect for working in government, which I think is wonderful. We’ll talk about it more, I expect. But particularly for those of you who have influence or oversight of public school education or public education at the higher level, I believe mandates for civics are vital if our democracy is to survive another 250 years. So I think you’re all in a—in a pivotal position to make an extraordinary difference when it comes to the trajectory of democracy in the United States. FASKIANOS: So, Richard, picking up on that point, you wrote this book because of—I don’t know if you’re still disclosing the school—the undergraduate who did not know anything. Why don’t you tell— HAASS: Irina, I want to interrupt you. You’re getting my books confused. That was the reason I wrote the last book, which was— FASKIANOS: Oh, that was the reason you wrote the last one. That’s right; I am. It’s been a long day. But if you could talk a little bit about why this is important because of the K through twelve curriculum and what—teaching civics. HAASS: Well, I’ll talk about it both K through twelve as well as higher ed. Americans are not born knowing about American history or American government or about democracy. Nobody is. So we have to teach it. We can’t just assume the transmission happens by itself genetically or simply because we somehow breathe it in. Doesn’t happen. And so we have got to make a conscious effort to transmit—to teach the narrative. I think it’s particularly important in the United States because unlike, say, Japan, which is a robust democracy, but Japan has a society which is homogenous in many ways. We are many things; we are not homogenous. I happen to think it’s one of our strengths. We’re a country of immigrants. We’re, in some ways, the most heterogenous democracy in the world when it comes to country of origin, when it comes to religion, when it comes to race, you name it. But as a result, those same features can become ways of pulling us apart. So, again, what brings us together is the idea of Americanness. And that was—that was central to the founding of this country—that this was a country founded on ideas, wasn’t founded on other attributes. So, again, it’s incumbent upon us to teach these ideas, to transmit this narrative. What’s so important about middle school and high school is it’s one of the very few things pretty much everyone in this country has to do, which is go to school through the age of 16. It could be public school, which is mostly is. It could be private school. It could be religious school. It could be homeschooling, what have you. But that’s our best opportunity to cast the widest net. And I believe that, you know, all of us would consider teaching young people how to read and count and think critically, how to access technology, get on the internet, and so forth, all that’s central. Why is this any less central? Why is it any less central to prepare people for their life to come as a—as a citizen? And so I would think that this ought to be required in all of our schools. It’s there for some. Usually it’s half a year, I don’t know, but you know, it’ll vary according to what state or city you’re from. Many states in the country it’s half a year, one or two it’s a full year, some nothing at all. And also, the content and quality of what is offered varies, shall we say, dramatically. It’s actually even worse, oddly enough, at the college and university level. I lost count; I think it’s about four thousand two- and four-year colleges in this country. Only a handful require that as a condition of graduation you take civics. Don’t get me wrong, virtually every university and college in the country offers civics or something close to it. But they’re not required. So depending upon the—how a student navigates his or her distribution requirements, they can easily graduate from school without having been exposed either to the basic documents, the basic history, or really any understanding. And I think it’s particularly critical there because, if you think about it, the average freshman’s eighteen. Well, they’ve got the right to vote already. They’re going to spend four years on campus and they’re going to be acting out politics on campus. And then they’re going to leave campus, and for the next however many years that they have in their lives they’re going to have the opportunity to vote. And again, we want them to vote and we want them to get informed as a runup to their voting. And civics, it seems to me, is part of that. When I say civics we can talk about the content, but it is history. And I more than understand how complicated that is, how politicized in some ways that’s gotten. There’s the basic documents I want people to be exposed to. There’s basic facts that are central to American history. And just to be clear, I don’t want to impose and I think it’s a mistake for anyone to impose a single interpretation of history on a young person. I think people ought to be exposed, again, to the basic documents, to the basic events and facts, and then they ought to be exposed to the serious representative schools of interpretation of that. I also think in this day and age we need to make information literacy part of this. New Jersey has done it. I’m hoping other states do it at the high school level. But we need to teach young people to become critical consumers of information. They’re being flooded. They’re being—and we live in this age of, if you will, unlimited information thanks to the Google machine and much else, but the problem is a lot of it’s misinformation. So how do students, how do they discern what’s a fact and what isn’t? How do they tell the difference between facts and opinions? How do they test what purports to be fact? What kind of behaviors—for example, I’m a big advocate of multi-sourcing information rather than single-sourcing. And so I think all this needs to be taught in our middle schools, obviously in our high schools, and at the college and university level. That’s the way we tool up Americans in order to fulfill the obligations of citizenship. And we just cannot assume it somehow happens otherwise. Indeed, we should assume it doesn’t happen otherwise. FASKIANOS: So your first obligation is to be informed. And Christina Jones, who is a councilmember in Raleigh, North Carolina, asks: How do you define “informed”? So if you can dig into that a little bit more, that would be great. HAASS: Actually, it’s a great question. It’s, obviously, subjective. But I would say, you know, inform—and it’s separate—it’s also separate from the question of how does one get informed. But I think what I would count as informed is I think people need to know something about American democracy, something about American history, how American government is structured, how it operates. So just kind of that’s the backdrop. We can—we can go into greater depth if people want. And then I also think being informed means understanding what the issues are and the consequences—you know, the choices and the consequences of those choices. So, to take an issue that Congress is going to have to take up in the not-too-distant future, something like the debt ceiling. And so the issue is, you know, what is the debt ceiling? What is Congress being asked to vote on? What happens if they—if they vote an increase in the—for the increase in the debt ceiling? What happens if they refuse to vote an increase in the debt ceiling? So that, to me, is an example of being informed about an issue. It doesn’t say which way to vote; I just want people to understand the choices, what is—what each choice holds within it. What are the—what are the consequences? What it involves. And then, hopefully, they can themselves make—reach an informed opinion and advocate for it or write their congressman or what have you about the way they would like that individual to vote. So I think there’s a combination in being informed—which is sort of understanding, if you will, the democratic basics in this country—and then one has to add to that a layer of being knowledgeable about some of the basic issues that are before us, be those issues domestic or international. And then the whole process of, you know, getting and staying informed. Again, some of the basics are a one-time thing to become, you know, familiar with them. You don’t have to read the Federalist Papers once a week and the rest, though every now and then a reading of the Constitution or the Declaration or Lincoln’s farewell address—I mean, Gettysburg Address and the rest is not a—not a bad thing to do. And by the way, if you’ve never read or haven’t read in a long time the Articles of Confederation, I recommend it. It really is a stunner. Out of all the things that surprised me in writing this book, the inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation I had forgotten. It’s quite stunning, quite stunning that anyone thought it could conceivably be a blueprint for anything other than total failure and inaction and, essentially, chaos. But I think there’s—again, you know, one needs to familiarize oneself with the basics, which is largely a one-time thing. I think then, again, one has to familiarize oneself with the issues, and I think there’s certain sources to go to. I’m not big on social media, just to be clear. Keyword there—the operative word—is “social.” That’s not—if it were serious media, it would be called “serious media.” So I think one has to go to serious media to get informed on the issues. I think it’s important to multi-source it rather than just put all your eggs in one basket. I think information literacy becomes part of it. So it’s not simple. It’s got a lot of dimensions to it. But again, it’s essential to fulfill—to check the box of being an informed patriot. HAASS: Irina, you’re on mute. FASKIANOS: We want to hear from you, your questions. There’s several now in the Q&A box, which I’ll read, but please we also hope that you will raise your hand. You can click the “raise hand” icon on your screen. You can, when I call on you, accept the unmute prompt and please state your name and affiliation. Of course, there’s also the written feature, too. Include your affiliation. And we like to have this be a best—a forum to share best practices, so please do that as well. So there is a written question from Hilary Ram: How do we inform citizens, indeed, but how do we do this with the death of local journalism? This seems to be our biggest challenge, getting the facts out to the public. And then there was a follow-on comment: Also, the term “journalist” has a wide range of definitions, so.  HAASS: Indeed it does. Look, I think you put your finger on one of the things that worries me, which is the shutting down of a lot of local news outlets. And you know, any number, of course, is largely economic, the breakdown of the advertising model. I understand. But it’s a real loss in this country. It’s a real loss because, you know, I grew up reading national papers but always reading a local paper, and it has a granularity that I think people—you know, I’m hoping some wealthy Americans decide that this is an area they could make a contribution in to sort of subsidize. I think that would be great. When people of means ask me what they can do, that’s always towards the top of my list. We actually do a program like this for local journalists where we try to beef up some of their access to information and analysis about the world on issues that might affect people in the area where they—where they publish. But it’s a real problem. You know, I don’t have great answers about what one does with the closing—you know, there’s still some papers. There’s still, you know, radio and so forth. But it’s a problem. And I think, you know, this issue of how we revive local media I think ought to get more attention than it does because there’s no way the big national media can do this, and they don’t. And it’s a real problem. And here I am in New York, which is not exactly a small town, and the coverage of New York City is really inadequate in the big papers. If you read—you know, I read among other things the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which are both published here, but there’s very little coverage with any depth about New York City. I don’t feel particularly well informed. And then so the question is, do I have to go to other, much more specific type of vehicles? And the answer is yes if I want to—if I want to—if I want to actually know what’s going on in the City Council or City Hall except for, you know, the very infrequent story usually written at 36,000 feet or about one particular issue. I would never get that from the major—the major outlets. So we pay a price here for not having really good local media or, you know, sufficient local media anymore. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Our next written question comes from Julia King and I don’t have her affiliation: This is an essential conversation. Do you have thoughts about how to have good-faith conversations around these challenging topics? It’s so easy to fall into angry discourse these days. And of course, we’ve seen the anger directed at election officials and school boards and those—and the like. So what can be done? HAASS: Well, again, I think, you know, I have several obligations that are relevant to that—things such as civility, commitment to nonviolence, and openness to compromise. And I call upon in the book religious authorities to use the authority of the pulpit. I’m not asking any minister or priest or rabbi or mullah or anybody else to take a stand on this or that policy issue, but this is—this is not policy to rule out political violence, to call for civility, to talk about being open to compromise. Who better than a religious figure and a religious authority could call for being sensitive to the common good? The last I checked, the notion of being one’s brothers’ and sisters’ keeper is rather basic to scripture. So religious authorities need to step up, I believe, and play a role here. I also think, you know, my hat goes off to a lot of these officials who are either getting verbally abused or in some cases physically threatened. I thought some of the secretaries of state who stood up through the electoral process a couple years ago, I talked about them in the book. That, to me, is a perfect example of putting the country before party or person. It’s the right thing to do. It’s not the easy thing to do. It’s anything but the easy thing to do. It’s courageous, it’s principled, and my hat goes off to them. So, again, you know, that’s the kind of behavior we need to see more. It’s the kind of behavior that John F. Kennedy wrote about in Profiles of Courage, people who did the right thing—in some cases compromised, in some cases refusing to compromise against all sorts of illegitimate pressures. But I don’t have any easy answers to you. Again, you know, this is a book where I write about obligations. And a lot of things won’t get better until more Americans get involved in the process of politics, and show up to vote in an informed way, and reward certain behaviors and penalize others. And all I can say is that that’s not hopeless because our elections in recent years, particularly national, have been sufficiently close—either the vote for—the electoral vote for president or the overall vote, say, for Congress—that actually a rather small number and percentage of Americans could have an outsized impact. So I don’t think this is in any way—in any way hopeless. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go to Bryan Barbin, who has a raised hand. And please identify yourself once you unmute yourself. Q: My name is Bryan Barbin. I’m deputy secretary for taxation in Pennsylvania’s Department of Revenue. My question relates to compromise in your book. I thought your book had—I liked it because if you don’t have an opposite duty for every right, then the right is only as good as force allows. So it’s the duty that allows the rights to go to everybody. But my question on compromise is, we know that compromise is best understood by the most people if it’s explained, but what are your suggestions, basically, for someone in my position or in any state agency to do a better job of maybe explaining that compromises that happen happen because they’re the better alternative—either the better alternative short term or the better alternative to build on? But how do we go about doing that, educating on that? HAASS: It’s a great question. In my experience, it requires—you know, real estate has three laws: location, location, location. I think compromise has three words: either explanation, explanation, explanation; or, repetition, repetition, repetition. The more complex and more controversial something is, the more one has to talk about it before, during, and after the compromise becomes a fact. I remember when I—see, go back here now about thirty years, when I worked for President Bush the father. And when he announced—you know, he went from “read my lips: no new taxes” to, obviously, agreeing to tax increases as part of a compromise, and it hurt him badly politically. But I think one of the reasons it hurt him badly is he came from the school of thought which was just do the right thing and don’t worry, and I thought that’s inadequate. I think, yeah, it’s necessary to do the right thing, but particularly when it’s complicated and controversial. In this case, it was obviously controversial because he went against what he had promised. He needed to do a heavy, heavy amount of work of explanation, and he didn’t—gave one speech, wasn’t one of his best speeches to say the least, and that was it. And it just—you know, the lesson I took from that is there’s no—there’s no substitute for frequent education and explanation. I don’t—I think the good news is I’m not familiar with the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, as best I know. If that changes, I’m sure you’ll be the first to let me know. But I watch what some of the state and city agencies do here. I’ve got—one of my kids works for the Department of Sanitation here in the city of New York and I see what they do on social media. It’s quite creative in terms of explaining certain policies, particularly where they’re innovating things like on composting. And they go to great length and so forth, and at least—so far, at least, they’re beating their metrics. And so to me, you know, you have to go think about all sorts of distribution systems, all sorts of social media, and so forth, as well as townhalls. I mean, different parts of the public, different age groups, people of different backgrounds absorb information different ways. For all I know, there’s a role for YouTube Shorts. I’m not a big fan of TikTok, but maybe YouTube Shorts. Or maybe there’s things on Facebook or Twitter or other social media. There’s, obviously, PSAs. But I would just think that finding all sorts of ways to reach people, doing the explanation. It’s not going to be perfect, but again, it certainly can’t hurt and it can help. And I don’t know, but that’s kind of where—but you know, I can hear in your voice a little bit of frustration, and I get it. As someone who tries to explain foreign policy issues and choices and compromises, it’s tough because it’s really—it’s not hard for those who oppose compromise, rather than characterize things, they caricature them or they make it sound so simple. Well, you know, and the word “compromise” has become something of a dirty word: Why did you sell out? Why didn’t you hold firm? And what you say is exactly the smart thing to say. Well, here were the—here were the real alternatives. You could have held out, but then this would have been the consequence. So compromise got me the best possible outcome that was available—not the best imaginable outcome, but the best available outcome. But it’s hard. And in an age of single-issue politics and social media, you’re going to get some heat. And I think all you—you know, that comes with the territory. And all you can do, again, is spend a lot of time explaining and repeating the explanation. FASKIANOS: So I’m just going to read a comment from Joseph Gacioch, who’s a city manager in Ferndale, Michigan: We will roll out our first community civics local government education program in the spring. Local government literacy is so important to civility and an informed community, and in local government our resources are waning every year. I like what you suggest and require civics as K through twelve. I posit state legislature should prioritize their budgets the same way and help fund experiential civics through the local government lens. Which I think is fascinating. HAASS: Love that. Look, could I just say something? FASKIANOS: Yes, absolutely. HAASS: It was Justice—it was Justice Brandeis, when he was on the Court, and one of my favorite phases—phrases of American political history is Brandeis’ phrase, which should appeal to all of you, as states as being the “laboratories of democracy.” The best ideas in the country tend to travel to Washington, and states become the place where, basically, you can test-drive ideas. And you can introduce programs at the state or local level—states, but essentially—and you can show it works. I love the idea, and I—of multiple boards of education, whether it’s statewide, citywide, what have you—countywide, what have you, experimenting here and trying various approaches, see how they work, talking to various experts. And I want to work with—I’ve already spoken to several governors about helping them develop programs both for civics and information literacy. But I think this is the way this is going to happen in this country. We’re going to show that certain things are really effective and popular and just good, and more and more—what I’m hoping is we create a kind of positive competition where people start saying: Hey, they got that at that school. They got that in that city, that state. Why don’t we have it here? So I think the idea that you all are going to innovate something on civics at the local level I think is fantastic. FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to David Lovlien, who wrote a question but you’ve also raised your hand. So I think you should ask it yourself. And identify yourself, please. Q: Thank you, Dr. Haass, for being with us today. I appreciate and value your time. I am a first-time, 25-year-old county commissioner representing District 3 in Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I want to be a good leader for the people that I serve. Dr. Henry Kissinger has said America needs more serious leaders and that the quality of leaders in America has diminished over time. How can I be a more serious, high-quality political leader? Thank you. HAASS: Well, first of all, I appreciate the question coming from your since I’m married to someone who went to the University of New Hampshire. So I’ve got connections to your state. Look, I think the fact that you’re asking the question is—suggests to me that you’re already on your way. I’m a great believer that the best way to learn about leadership is through history and biography. My single favorite book for people in government is a book called Thinking in Time. It was written by two professors. I used to co-teach it with them years and years ago, a guy named Ernest May and another named Richard Neustadt. It’s called Thinking in Time and I think the subtitle is The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. Irina can circulate a link. But it’s the whole idea about how to use history to help guide you for decisions that you’re confronted with now. I’ve written a book called The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur, which again was designed to help people in the public sector make better decisions, and to implement them more efficiently and effectively. So I think there’s—you know, there’s literature out there, if you will—the Neustadt-May book, my book—which deals with almost mechanics and how to—the intellectual side of things. But I love the idea, essentially, of reading history and biography because—of people who faced the challenges of leadership, whether at the, you know, federal level, the state level. A lot of—even the corporate level. There’s a lot of—a lot of similarities. There’s a lot of good literature on decision-making and so forth. But that’s—and at some point, there’s no substitute for experience and learning from it. You know, you’re going to make mistakes, and the real thing is to set up, you know, mechanisms so you learn from them. And then, you know, I’m a great believer in not repeating mistakes. You will always make mistakes. I just want to be innovative and make new ones. I hate repeating the same ones. But, again, I can’t think of anything better than, you know, some of these books about leadership, particularly in the public sector. And then, you know, there’s just so much good—you know, the Doris Kearns Goodwins, the Michael Beschlosses, the Walter Isaacsons, the Jon Meachams. You know, we’re blessed in this country with some sensational historians and biographers. So I would—I would just—you know, almost any of the great names of American history, I would read some of those. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Gail Patterson-Gladney, who is a councilmember in Poughkeepsie, New York: As a county commissioner, I would like to invite middle and high school students to attend county commissioners meetings. Besides reaching out to government teachers, do you have any suggestions on how to involve students in county government? HAASS: I love that idea. One of the things I recommend in The Bill of Obligations, I have a section on—the last section on the book is where to go for more, and I have all sorts of things to read and so forth. But the last bit is to get people to see government in action. You know, it could be as simple or not so simple as being on a jury. One thing I recommend to every young person and not so young person, if you’ve never done it in your life, is to attend the oral arguments at the Supreme Court. It’s an amazing experience. To see politics in action at the local level, the state level, the federal level, watching hearings. I mean, CSPAN’s OK, but it’s more fun to do it in person. You know, but I think—you know, to go to the National Archives. I love the idea where people can—it becomes a physical, if you will, experience. I think for the kind of thing you’re talking about—and, by the way, I know Poughkeepsie very well. I am at that train station with enormous frequency, since I have home not far from there. What I would recommend is creating arrangements with administrators or teachers for internship programs. You know, we have an internship program here, and we probably bring in, I don’t know, 125-130 interns a year at the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s a sensational program for getting people, you know, into the—for me—into the foreign policy, international world. They learn things, some of which are specific to that. Some of the things you learn are useful for any—for any job. And we have others—there’s other sorts of programs. There’s a program here called Global Kids for high school kids who—again, it’s like a three-week boot camp every summer which exposes them to international things. But I would have some kind of an arrangement with schools. Maybe they could get some—you know, a course credit or whatever it happens to be—for students to intern in various agencies or offices, or at a minimum, short of that, at least to see—to go see a hearing. Just to get a sense, and maybe spend a few hours getting a talk or two about how local government affects their lives. But I think—what I think is important for young people is to give them a sense that what government does matters. Also, to give them a sense that it’s a potential career path, that it’s something that they could do which would be really, really interesting and might make a—might make a difference.  But I would think some type of—creating those kinds of bridges, so to speak, whatever the word is—between local schools—you could also do it at the high school. I mean, at the college level near Poughkeepsie you got Bard, obviously, and some other schools. But some sort of program I think would be—you know, I think it’s a great part of a civic—it’s not a substitute for civics education, but it’s a component of a civics education. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Dennis Mandsager, who has a raised hand. Q: Can you hear me now? HAASS: Yes, sir. FASKIANOS: We can. Q: OK. Thank you, Dr. Haass. Much appreciate this event. I’m retired Navy, but I got this invitation because I’m on the Iowa Civil Rights Commission. And there’s been a flurry of bills that some organizations say are really targeting the LGBTQ community. For example, a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex civil unions and marriages. There’s a proposal to eliminate gender identity as a protected class. There’s a bill that has passed both houses that says there’s no transition medical treatment available for anybody under the age of eighteen. There’s a bill that says your ID card must reflect your gender at birth.  And often, the people in favor of these bills use religion or the Bible as their primary argument. My church, for example, the Lutheran Church, says we should respect same-sex marriage, but we don’t have to honor them. And my church also supports statutes that prohibit discrimination against same-sex marriages and civil unions. But most of these bills are voted on along party lines. And you have referred to compromise a number of times today. How does a good Republican, a good Democrat, a good commissioner deal with this battle over gender identity and various LGBTQ+ issues? HAASS: It ain’t easy, because these issues, for some people, are seen as absolute for, you know, you mentioned religion or scripture. If people derive their position from scripture, or their interpretation of scripture, to be more accurate, there’s probably not a whole lot of give in it. And, you know, you mention the idea about transitioning not until the age of eighteen. Well, that, in some ways, represents a compromise. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying that where one sets an age level. We’ve had it—you know, we’ve had compromises on abortion. You know, what’s—in terms of the timing of when abortions are allowed or not. We now see differences between and among the states. So even these totally—you know, some of the most difficult issues we find in our politics, there is an element of compromise there. But at the end of the day, these are issues that have been brought into the political space. I think it’s legitimate for them to be brought into the political space. Societies have the right to define themselves and to say certain types of behaviors are or are not permissible. That’s, in part, what defines societies. If these—whatever the standards are or whatever the rules are, we have ways through legislation they can be, in a sense, taken into the political marketplace. And we then have the courts, because courts can sometimes say that certain things are against other rights. And there is a struggle—there is a struggle there. For individuals who feel strongly on this side of an issue or the other, there’s political involvement. So for those who think certain things ought to happen, and those who think certain thoughts ought not to be allowed, that’s the political marketplace. And that’s where you organize, you support candidates who agree with you, you try to educate, your vote, what have you. So I don’t think we can ban these things. I’m not even sure we should ban these things from the political arena. In some cases, though, getting compromise is going to be brutally difficult. Again, I have no illusions here. I’m many things. Naïve is probably not among them. And no one has to treat them like any other political issue. And, you know, the iron law in American politics is what tends to prevail is not overall numbers but intensity. And those who fight for or against certain issues and bring to it great political intensity often have an outsized degree of influence or impact in the political space. And then, again, for those who don’t get the political outcome they want, then besides just the next election, then there are always options through taking cases to the courts. Q: Thank you very much. FASKIANOS: OK. Thank you. There is a comment—there are a lot of comments in the Q&A box. So you should—people should look at that. We will send out the list of the books that Richard has mentioned. So we will do that in the follow-up note, with the link to this event as well.  HAASS: Irina, can I mention something that we haven’t mentioned? FASKIANOS: Yes. Yes, please do. HAASS: Am I allowed to do that? FASKIANOS: Absolutely. HAASS: So we’ve talked about some of the things that can happen at the state and local level that can make a real difference. And I talked a lot about civics education. I’ve talked a lot about modeling certain behaviors. One thing I’d just like to throw out there is public service. That I’m a great believer in it. And the reason is clear. I think right now, in this country, this society is too divided. We don’t have a sufficient number of shared or common experiences. We’re too divided by geography, class, educational—levels of educational attainment, gender, race, religion, politics, what cable station we watch, what radio station we listen to.  And I think that is bad for the fabric of American society. I’m not saying everybody has to agree. That’s never going to happen. But I worry about the degree to which increasingly we don’t know a lot of our fellow citizens and we’re not used to interacting with them. We’re all living in our own, to use the phrase, ecosystems. And I don’t think that sets the stage for a functioning democracy. I think it sets the stage for—potentially for gridlock, or violence, or you name it.  So public service, it seems to me, is one of the ways we bring people together from different backgrounds who would otherwise not get together. And don’t get me wrong, I am not—repeat, not—advocating for anything mandatory at the state or federal level. I think that would be an error. But I think we ought to incentivize it. And I know California’s doing an awful lot. Maryland’s looking into it. But there’s an awful lot of progress. It needs to be incentivized, paying people for the work they do. It’s not going to make them rich. They’re not going to make Fortune’s, you know, wealthiest 100 list. But it’ll give them something. We can also condition loan guarantee forgiveness—student loan guarantee forgiveness—a degree of it can be conditioned on public service.  I think employers, like they now give certain preferences to veterans, might be persuaded to give certain preferences to people who perform certain types of public—same thing for universities. I can imagine admissions counselors would say if you’ve had one or two years of experience in a gap year working at whatever, we will consider that a major plus when we consider your application. I also think this kind of service, these government programs, might give some people an interaction with the government that’s more positive than they ever imagined. So I would just say—I would just urge people to think about it, in the context of your city or state, whether there’s a potential role greater than what you already have for various types of public service that would actually do good for communities or for certain objectives in your—in your city or state. But would do a lot—do a lot of good for the society and do a lot of good for individuals. This could be a great way to train them and so forth, to make them more attractive to future employers, or what have you. So it’s just one of the things we haven’t yet had a chance to do. But I think there’s a real opportunity at the state level. And this, to me, is not a Republican or Democrat thing. I think this is actually something that there ought to be a degree of bipartisanship on. And obviously there’ll be compromises to be made about what the incentives are and what sort of programs count as legitimate public service. Fair enough. So but I think it’s something worth pursuing. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Megan Huether has a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. This has been wonderful. I serve on the Board of Aldermen in Manchester, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis, where I hold a nonpartisan office. And what you’re saying, and the whole topic, is resonating with me. And I’ve really been spending a lot of time thinking about local governments and neighborhoods being kind of the unit of political change that can help us overcome this polarization and isolation that we have. You know, as leaders, you were talking about how can we be good leaders and encouraging civic participation, providing on-ramps for people to come in and get involved in their local government so that they experience that ownership and practice these obligations that you detail in your book. One of the experiences that I’m finding is that, you know, when I welcome people and encourage their participation, there’s a reluctance to participate because of concerns that I think are filtering down to the local nonpartisan level from higher levels of government, where they do not want to participate in the divisiveness. I’m wondering if you have, you know, reflected upon this problem, and how kind of that polarization is causing people really to not take part more civically. And if you have advice as we engage in those conversations, or inspirational examples of, you know, communities that have been able to overcome that. Thank you. HAASS: No, it’s a wonderful question with a lot of insight. And I think—first of all, I think you’re spot on. I think a lot of younger people who hopefully are idealistic—if you’re not idealistic when you’re young, when are you going to be—are turned off. And the word “politics” has become something pejorative in this country. Oh yeah, that’s just politics. And it’s seen as divisive, or unproductive, or ugly, or whatever. I don’t know a way to ban that, and that gets at a lot of my obligations. And those are behaviors, norms, and civility, and compromise. All I think you can do is two things. In our civics education, we can encourage certain behaviors. One of the things I like when we teach civics is to do things like debates or have mock Congress, mock city hall, mock state legislature, mock Supreme Court, whatever, mock constitutional convention, in ways that give students the chance to participate. And the teachers can step in and moderate, if you will, you know, blow the whistle, almost like a sporting match, and say: Hey, you know, John just said these things to Mary in the following way. Let’s just put aside the issue we’re debating. Let’s just talk about what just happened. So I think there’s things we can do if we structure the education so it’s not just about content but it’s about behaviors, it’s about tone, it’s about style, it’s about civility, and the rest, I think, would be one thing. And then, you know, you all are in positions. You run your office. You’re involved in a hearing or you’re involved in what have you. Well, again, you set an example every day by what you do and how you do it. And that, to me, is one of the most important things of leadership, is the example you set. Now, I deal with foreign policy all the time. And people say, how should the United States go about promoting democracy? And I say, oh that’s easy. I don’t need people from the State Department preaching it. I need people from the United States day-in, day-out, demonstrating that democracy delivers, that it’s an attractive form of government that makes people’s lives better. If we do that, people around the world will get the message loud and clear. If we fail to do that, they will basically say: Hey, this democracy ain’t so hot. We don’t need it here. And that’s why I think, you know, you all have a degree of influence over your immediate situations. And if you can make those, you know, better, and if you can find colleagues who you can work with across the political aisle, then it sends a powerful message that, you know, partisan differences are not insurmountable. FASKIANOS: I’m going to try to squeeze in one last question from Katherine Castrejon (sp). I might be mispronouncing that. And please be brief. Q: OK. Hi, everyone. My name is Katherine Castrejon. I work for a state senator here in California. I just wanted to ask, this is—like, politics have been very controversial in the past few years. And I believe that voters are hesitant in voting in these—in this time of year. So what would you recommend to, I guess, kind of help those younger voters to continue voting? Thank you. HAASS: Sure. Well, part of a civics course would be to show how voting matters, how small numbers can have unbelievably large impacts. If one looks at presidential elections, a couple of thousand votes in a couple of states has often swung—you know, made the differences. In congressional races, small numbers, again, can decide the difference not just in that race but in the overall balance in a state legislature or in the Congress at the federal level. And I would constantly remind people of how what government does, and how it does it matters. There’s almost no aspect of our life, for better or worse, that’s not affected by government. So I would want to basically get students—give students the appreciation that government matters. And even when you disagree with what it’s doing, that there’s ways of potentially weighing in or getting involved that would change it.  That it's not some impersonal, inanimate force. Or, in politics, there’s very—there’s almost nothing that’s inevitable or baked into the cake. And I want to give students the sense of possibility, that political involvement has with it the possibility of making a difference in good ways in their lives, and in their communities, and in the country. And basically saying, you should—you know, whether it’s limited to being an informed voter or you make a career choice to get involved in politics in whatever way, or at whatever level, or in public service whether it’s the military or law enforcement or what have you, that this can be a really important and satisfying—and satisfying path. So I think one just has to continue to reinforce the message of possibility. FASKIANOS: I am sorry that we could not get to all the questions, both raised hands and written questions. There were a lot of good resources shared in the comment section, which we will—we will pull together, aggregate for you all, and send out a link. Richard, thank you, again, for doing this with us. Thank you for this book, The Bill of Obligations, and all the others that you have written. Dr. Haass is on Twitter. You can follow him at @richardhaass. And you can subscribe to his weekly newsletter on Substack, Home and Away, by going to richardhass.substack.com.  You can also follow the State and Local Officials Initiative at @CFR_local. Please visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for more expertise and analysis. Again, we will circulate a link to the webinar and transcript, but you can also send us an email to [email protected] with any suggestions for future topics, speakers, and the like. We want to support the important work that you are doing in your communities. So again, Richard Haass, thank you for this. Thank you for the State and Local Officials Initiative. And thanks to all of you for taking the time today to be with us. HAASS: Thank you, all. Thank you, Irina. (END)