Why are Middle East dictators so bad at media?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, February 21, 2011 - 2:55 PM Share

In Sayf-Al-Islam's rambling speech last night on Libyan State television, he blamed the current unpleasantness in his country on, as near as I can determine, crazed African LSD addicts. 

This isn't going down as well as Sayf had intended, and Libya seems less stable than 24 hours earlier.  Indeed, Sayf's off-the-cuff remarks managed to make Hosni Mubarak's three speeches seem like a model of professionalism, which I would not have thought was possible a week ago.  

Indeed, it is striking how utterly incompetent leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have been at managing their media message.  Speeches are announced, then never delivered on time, and then delivered with production values that woulds embarrass a public access channel in the U.S.  It's like political leaders in the region have discovered blogs just as the young people has moved on to Twitter or something.  [Er, no, that's the United States--ed.]  Oh, right. 

Having just finished a week of intense media whoring, methinks that one problem is that most of these leaders have simply fallen out of practice (if they were ever in practice) at personally using the media to assuage discontent.  I've been on enough shows on enough different media platforms to appreciate that there is an art, or at least a tradecraft, to presenting a convincing message in the mediasphere.  Authoritarian leaders in the Middle East are quite adept at playing internal factions off one another.  That's a different skill set than trying to craft a coherent and compelling media message to calm street protestors no longer intimidated by internal security forces. 

Indeed, as I argued in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, bureaucratic first responses to novel situations are almost uniformly bad.  Sayf pretty much admitted this last night, as he acknowledged that the Libyan armed forces were not trained to deal with street protestors.  I suspect the same is true with the state media outlets -- they excel at producing tame, regime-friendly pablum during quiescent periods, but now they're operating in unknown territory. 

I also argued that bureaucracies should be able to adapt their organizational routines over time, if a regime's domestic support does not evaporate.  Readers are encouraged to predict which regimes under threat in the Middle East are the most likely to be able to adapt.  My money is on Iran -- not because that regime is more popular, but simply because Iran's leaders have had eighteen months to adapt and they are therefore further down the learning curve. 

Developing....

EXPLORE:MEDIASPHERE, AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS, AUTHORITARIANISM, MEDIA WHOREDOM, MEDIASPHERE, MIDDLE EAST, WEB 2.0
 

GRANT

6:41 PM ET

February 21, 2011

It's actually surprising.

It's actually surprising. Libya is the one state that I would have definitely assumed would know how to handle this. But I was wrong on Egypt and I might be wrong on Libya. At least I can console myself with the knowledge I was right on Iran.

 

OPEMILY

1:01 AM ET

February 22, 2011

Libya isn't good at public

Libya isn't good at public relations ever. Unless their strategy is to portray Gaddafi as a clown and disregarded. What a funny man in silly outfits making crazy statements. Who thinks he's funny now?

 

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9:04 AM ET

February 22, 2011

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JOENYC

4:56 PM ET

February 22, 2011

out of the loop

Where have you been? The production quality for the addresses that Mubarak, Qadaffi, et al have been giving is standard in these types of countries. I'm always amazed at how out of touch so many American commentators are. Or did you just not turn on the TV last time you were in these countries? All of the networks in these countries have serious issues when it comes to production quality. As far as the message, you are similarly out of touch. The problem on that issue is really one of competition - as in, there isn't any. These guys are used to issuing their decrees and speeches as deities. When I lived in West Africa in the 1990s, the diplomats would snicker throughout the head of state's 3-hour state of the nation speech as it moved from the rather mundane issues of, say, maintaining the roads, to the wild and wacky bizarre ideas that happened to cross the president's mind that morning. It was amusing, to be sure, but to me reflected that they simply did not have a good speechwriter there to say, "OK, that's enough right there, we can stop at the flying mules reference." Capacity is a huge problem in some of these countries. Anyone with any sense knows it. The idea that they could manage a message is really quite outlandish - they have to come up with one first, remember. This at least partly explains their demise. They're simply too far out of date - and it reinforces that they are out of touch, simply making matters much, much worse in terms of winning any support from the public. I'm sure plenty of Libyans would like to see Qadaffi remain in power - but at some point, you start to look seriously silly to support a guy who says, "i'm just going to hang on as long as i can," which is essentially what he said today. How ridiculous is that?

 

QOHELET

9:33 PM ET

February 22, 2011

Bring Back the Pharaoh!

Middle Eastern autocrats haven't always had difficulty with PR...

Perhaps they could take a historical cue:
http://hpronline.org/world/bring-back-the-pharaoh/

 

CEOUNICOM

1:22 AM ET

February 23, 2011

OUCH...

... I tried watching the Q make his speech....

...I had to stop after 3 minutes. Too stupid, too incoherent, too embarrassing. Academy Award acceptances are by contrast like MLK on the mountaintop. The guy did nothing but justify his own immediate ouster.

 

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4:07 AM ET

February 23, 2011

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Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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