There's a big problem in this sort of thing. Americans, like other cultures that developed out of the European Enlightenment, believe in an objective truth that is separate from whoever is perceiving it. Hence we assume all that we need to do is communicate "ground truth" in order to counter propaganda.

In other cultures, truth has more of an affinity component. In other words, who is telling the story matters greatly. The closer someone is to you, the more validity you ascribe to what they say. Hence a family member has a lot of validity, someone from the same village or clan a little less, then other affinities--tribe, ethnicity, sect, religion, etc.

Neither of these ways of assessing information is inherently right or wrong. But they are different.

This is the reason that U.S. IO in non-Western cultures has limitations. There are thousands of instances where the U.S. blamed for someone by local people and provides physical evidence that it was not responsible, but still is blamed because the person placing the blame on the Americans had some form of affinity with their audience.

What all this means is that the idea that if the US did a better job at IO or was better organized it would be more effective is basically a myth. We are always going to have a serious credibility problem. That is simply part of the psychological terrain we operate in as much as a mountain range is part of the physical terrain. As with a mountain range, we need to focus on work-arounds rather than "solutions."