02 June 2009
State’s McHale to Spearhead U.S. Global Public Engagement
Washington — Judith McHale, President Obama’s selection to spearhead the government’s public outreach to global audiences, says the United States needs to engage the people of the world in new and innovative ways.
“I believe passionately that public diplomacy is both integral to our foreign policy and essential for our national security,” McHale, a former international media executive, said at her recent Senate confirmation hearing. The U.S. Senate confirmed McHale as the new under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs on May 21. A significant part of her job will be to guide the government in informing global audiences and helping them understand U.S. policies.
“We have to do a better job reaching out, of connecting with publics around the world, of communicating with them in every aspect that we do,” she said in a May 27 interview with America.gov.
McHale understands well the breadth and reach of global communications from more than 20 years in the cable television industry. She was the president and chief executive officer of Discovery Communications for two decades and was a leader in building the global media company, which is the parent company of the Discovery Channel and other properties, into an enterprise with 1.4 billion subscribers in 170 countries and 35 languages.
“I am frequently asked why Discovery was so successful internationally, and I think the key to that success was ... in the way we approached it. We really made a big effort to understand what people were looking for, how they heard the messages, how they wanted to receive their information, what they were looking for, and we really looked at them as our partners,” she said. “We did a lot to understand their cultures.”
That is the approach McHale said will guide her in spearheading U.S. public diplomacy programs that cover three bureaus within the State Department. She said public diplomacy should aim to speak to foreign audiences’ aspirations and interests, providing information and services they value and positioning the United States as a partner working toward shared solutions to common challenges.
McHale, a political science graduate of the University of Nottingham in Britain and the Fordham University Law School in New York, developed her understanding of foreign affairs as the daughter of a U.S. diplomat who was stationed in Britain and apartheid-era South Africa, experiences that helped to shape McHale’s world view.
In order to secure U.S. strategic interests in the current international environment, “the United States must continue to move beyond traditional government-to-government diplomacy and seek innovative ways to communicate and engage directly with foreign publics,” McHale said.
NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
New media technology and social networking are vital to achieving those long-term goals, McHale said.
“We have to get to a state where we can connect with literally billions of people around the world, and there’s simply not going to be a way to do that unless we use all the tools that are at our fingertips,” she said.
“We have to use technology where it’s appropriate. We have to understand what technologies are appropriate in a particular market,” McHale said. But she added that technology itself is a tool, and not a strategy for communicating.
McHale said in her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “new technology, used effectively and creatively, can be a game changer.” The technology provides the government with an opportunity to apply a new model of engaging interactively and collaboratively across lines that might have divided the United States from global audiences.
“We must create an institutional framework that can take full advantage of new media, with an understanding that these tools must be carefully tailored to particular circumstances and always used in the service of a larger strategy.”
McHale also said she believes that reaching out to global audiences is not something the government can or should do alone. “We face large challenges and stretched resources. We must take full advantage of public-private partnerships, which can serve as significant force multipliers for our efforts,” she testified.
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