Post 8: EOTO II: The Smith-Mundt Act

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        If looking into the Smith-Mundt Act, we are not looking at a trail of history instead of a long piece of governmental document. During the 70 years margin of the two Smith-Mundt Acts, there are many things that can be looked into and discussed. 


Starting in 1945, the age where the world recollected itself after the chaos of World war II, the U.S. government decided that they needed an information service that can prevent future war and be an effective political communication platform. Brought up in the 79th Congress by congressman Karl E. Mundt, passed by the 80th Congress, the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 started a brand new page in the U.S. diplomacy policy. The original act is also known as the Smith-Mundt Act (SMA). 


SMA gave the state department the right to create propaganda to foreign countries through various forms of information as a form of diplomacy. “The U.S. government was permitted to lie to people in other countries, but not to the U.S. citizens”, written by Kathleen McCarthy in the article “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012”. This associate information was allowed to be communicated through broadcasting, books, media, in-person communications, etc, and the funding came from another legislation passed by Appropriations under the U.S. Congress, which is giving agencies the power to ask for funding from the U.S. Treasury. 


During the later years, there were debates on the ethics and effectiveness of the original Smith Mundt Act. For example, shall taxpayers in the U.S. pay for information that is not directed toward themselves? How much censorship is appropriate for the media? In 1985, Senator of Nebraska Edward Zorinsky stated that “‘propaganda’ must be kept out of America to distinguish the U.S. from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity”. This indirectly led to the abolition of the USIA in 1999. 


Fast forward to 2012, the Obama administration passed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (SMMA). Building on the foundations of SMA, SMMA allowed the same propaganda that was used to be directly overseas to be presented to the U.S. citizens within the country. In short, it was considered as “a government-sanctioned license to lie”. American citizens, therefore, needed to face lawfully disinformation and misinformation existing in their own state news. 


While considering the accomplishment the Smith-Mundt Act has created for U.S. diplomacy, there are a couple of downsides to the new Smith-Mundt Act, first, it puts “free press” under the 1st amendment at risk. People can no longer put full trust in their state media due to the possible information corruption and intentional disinformation directly toward a certain desired outcome. As a result, the views are likely to generate conditioned responses. What modern-day citizens can do is to use the law to protect one’s unalienable right and educate oneself and people around to distinguish genuine information and mad ones. True freedom shall never lay in a governmentally defined “liberty”, maybe no one can ever achieve total freedom, but there are still things that one can do to protect oneself and make the experience worth it. 


Sources: 

Smith-Mundt Act. US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948. https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/smith-mundt/.

H.R.5736 - Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736

Seventy Years of the Smuth-Mundt Act and U.S. International Broadcasting: Back to the Future?. https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/sites/uscpublicdiplomacy.org/files/Seventy_Years_Metzgarv2.pdf.

Brief History of the Smith-Mundt Act and Why Changing It Matters. https://mountainrunner.us/2012/02/history_of_smith-mundt/

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. https://www.rcreader.com/commentary/smith-mundt-modernization-act-2012.


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