Melik Kaylan’s Jan. 28 editorial-page essay “They’re Paranoid, We’re Blase,” misses the point about how best to win the “hearts and minds” of the Arab world. He writes that the best way to counter Arab propaganda and the misperceptions about the U.S. in the Arab world is with increased American propaganda.

Wrong. The way to defeat propaganda is not with counterpropaganda but with promotion of independent, locally produced, indigenous media for the region. The experience of American-funded nongovernmental organizations over several decades proves that educating media professionals in the values of civil society and the fundamentals of professional journalism is the best way to guarantee that news and information will be accurately and objectively reported.

Mr. Kaylan suggests America won the Cold War through “cultural propaganda” because we “convinced subject populations that we, more than the Soviets, had their well being in mind.” But he fails to recognize the far more important effects that media had in the fall of communism. And he fails to recognize that in the Muslim world, it is the privatization of media in countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Lebanon that will enable more moderate voices to be heard.

None of this is to suggest that U.S. government-sponsored broadcasting does not have an important role to play, along with other forms of public diplomacy. Both should be supported. But in today’s information age, it is the privatization of television and radio, and the growth of the Internet and cell phones, that offer the best hope of positive change in once-closed societies.

We shouldn’t imitate Soviet propaganda or the disinformation of Islamic extremists. Our greatest weapons will continue to be good old American freedom, private enterprise, and the proliferation of pluralistic, open media.

David Hoffman
President
Internews Network
(Internews is an international non-profit organization working to improve access to information for people around the world.)