ABSTRACT

This chapter examines diplomacy and bad media. The first section describes what is meant by media, how people often think media is bad, and the way bad media can make international relations worse than they need to be. The second section of the chapter examines revolutions in the technologies of information and communications and how diplomats have tried to cope with them, focusing on how they have tried to ignore, contain, and exploit mass media and social media. It considers the expansion of diplomatic communication from sparse official bulletins to press briefings and conferences, the skills diplomats have developed for conducting successful interviews, the development of websites for ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, and consulates, and the active involvement of diplomats in social media. The third section of the chapter looks at how social media erodes the boundary between the thing observed and the observer which is assumed by mediation, and how it produces virtual diplomacy which can make international relations worse as a result of the way it amplifies the bad media consequences of bias, oversimplification, and exaggeration. It reviews the emergence of the largely pre-digital “CNN effect” of almost live coverage of international news, before focusing on diplomatic tweets and information warfare, and it employs the ideas of remediation and hyperrealism to do so. The final section of the chapter examines the possibility that different sites for mediating international relations can be demarcated in terms of their significance because of the huge quantities of information they produce and the short life of that information. In an era of information inflation and information devaluation, demarcation in terms of significance can reduce the effects of bad media. Diplomats can contribute to this process of demarcation by authoritatively signaling what must be attended to and what can be ignored. However, to do this effectively, they require the cooperation of those who use them and, where possible, those who control them.