In a phone interview today, Floyd—who is now director of external relations at the Center for a New Security, a Washington think tank—elaborated on what led him to abandon his career at the State Department, the only place he'd ever wanted to work.
"I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," he recalled. "They'd say, 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say, 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.' "
He recounted a phone conversation with a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad who wanted Floyd and his colleagues to sell the media more "good-news stories" about the war in Iraq. "I said, 'Fine, tell me a good-news story, I want good-news stories, too.' There was a silence on the other end of the line," he recalled. "It was like you could hear crickets chirping."
Floyd would tell his colleagues that the administration's message was drifting dangerously out of synch with reality. He was finding it increasingly difficult to place officials' op-ed pieces in serious newspapers. Few broadcast media, other than Christian radio networks, wanted to interview the department's experts, dismissing what they had to say as "more blah-blah from the State Department."
After a few recitations of these warnings, his bosses, as he put it, "started telling me to shut up. They didn't want to hear this."
Propaganda Vs. Radical Transparency
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