Questioning is a very powerful tool. It can also be a very powerful enemy.
No one seems to understand this better than former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who experienced a sticky interview last summer on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.” During host Tim Russert’s questioning, viewers were astounded when Colin Powell’s response to a question regarding the absence of WMD was suddenly interrupted. Apparently, one of Powell’s press aides found Russert’s line of questioning politically dangerous and decided to intervene by abruptly turning the camera away from Powell and toward the Kuwaiti seascape.
After an awkward pause, Powell demanded that the camera be placed back on him. He understood that if the spontaneous censorship occurred, the implication would be that he could not justify American intervention or was incapable of explaining the administration’s intent. Although Powell recovered from this political misstep, the damage had been done, and the precedent set.
Censorship that began at the whim of one press aid has now become a deliberate political strategy of current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
Secretary Rice is currently engaged in a continental tour of Europe, attempting to repair strained international relations. One of Dr. Rice’s recent political stops was Paris’ Institute of Political Science — a place where she should feel right at home. After all, Rice was formerly a political science professor at Stanford and the school’s provost. Politics and academia are her specialties. Nevertheless, the Secretary of State found something threatening about the Parisian academic atmosphere.
As the Washington Post reported, U.S. officials requested that the Institute hold Dr. Rice’s address and the following question-and-answer session behind closed doors. This seemed to be a normal security measure, except that the doors were closed mostly to French students, professors and journalists. In fact, of the 550 seats available, pre-selected French citizens filled only 100. The U.S. embassy, in a move that seems unlikely to foster good foreign relations, reserved the other 450.
The attendance was not the only controlled variable at the appearance. Dr. Rice’s staff also requested that five questions be submitted to the staff before her comments began. Assuring the attendees that Rice would answer “at least five questions,” the audience naturally assumed that discussion would go beyond pre-meditated questions and responses.
Pacified by the possibility of some genuine dialogue, the students and faculty of the Institute listened politely to Rice’s speech. The applause was warm and frequent as Rice encouraged France and the U.S. to “bring to the table our ideas and our experience and our resources, and let us discuss and decide, together, how best to employ them for democratic change.”
Cooperation and discourse appeared to be Rice’s prescriptions for the more productive international relations. However, she promptly abandoned both strategies by abruptly ending and exiting the question-and-answer session — after mechanically responding to the five pre-determined questions. The disappointed students were denied any opportunity to engage in true questioning or conversation with Dr. Rice and left feeling cheated and duped.
According to her speech, Secretary of State Rice deems open discussion necessary to achieve successful diplomacy and international action, so why didn’t she utilize this tool? As a skilled politician and a highly educated diplomat, what could she possibly have to fear in the students’ interrogations?
After all, Rice survived nine grueling hours in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There, her audience was out not just for information, but blood. Fielding attacks from California Senator Barbara Boxer and Massachusetts’ John Kerry should have prepared Rice for basic policy inquisitions from Parisian students, but she insisted on censoring the questions, limiting the parameters of the dialogue and discrediting her diplomatic mission.
Unfortunately, this “pick and choose” censorship is contributing to the attack on political discourse in the United States. Sadly, Americans have grown accustomed to highly-structured, rhetoric-laden, propaganda-filled political snippets that rarely provide substantive responses to the question at hand. Political debate has been reduced to 90-second sound bites and meaningless 30-second rebuttals.
For that reason, it is easy for us to sympathize with the French students who felt frustrated in their forced silence. It is one thing to have your questions left unanswered, but to not even have them heard is a far more dangerous threat to democracy.
Dr. Rice is correct that America must improve our political discourse internationally, but we must do it at home as well. Open, honest and unrestricted dialogue between public officials and their constituents is a cornerstone of democracy, and one that we can’t afford to surrender or censor out of political existence.
Sarah Howard ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science.
