Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2011
‘Politics has become a contest of competitive credibility’, argued Nye in Soft Power. Indeed, being perceived as honest and reliable is a necessary condition for obtaining and holding the attention of target audiences, as well as for effective persuasion, which is the objective of strategic communication. This task has become all the more difficult with the explosion of information sources and the discreditation efforts of opponents, but it is an essential element in the conduct of public diplomacy. How, then, do states and other international actors go about establishing their credibility while undermining that of opponents? This article employs rhetorical theory, impression management theory, and account theory to situate contests of credibility within the broader context of the accountability of social conduct. The theoretical part discusses the rhetorical strategies that actors use to credit their accounts and discredit those of their rivals. The empirical part addresses the debate between Israel and human rights groups over the Qana bombing incident of July 2006. The analysis of the blame imposition strategies used by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the accounts offered by Israel, indicates the range and variability of credibility talk and the rules for crediting accounts that underlie it.
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29 Ibid., p. 2, emphasis in original.
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36 The two explanations can be seen as complementary if an actor first seeks to construct a certain identity for social power reasons, then is forced to protect it if it is challenged by another actor or an audience.
37 Tedeschi and Riess, ‘Identities’, pp. 5–10. A ‘predicament of image enhancement’, on the other hand, occurs when due credit for positive consequences is under threat of denial.
38 Schlenker, Barry R., Impression Management: The Self-Concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations (Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1980), p. 131Google Scholar .
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45 Ibid.
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47 Credibility is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for persuasion. It is not a necessary condition because, as Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson note in their discussion of the effectiveness of attractive communicators in advertising, ‘we hold our beliefs for other reasons in addition to our desire to be correct and to size up the world accurately. We hold our beliefs and attitudes in order to define and make sense of our selves’. See their Age of Propaganda, rev.ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2001), p. 131Google Scholar , emphasis in original. Credibility is not a sufficient condition, because it can be overridden by other factors, such as resistance due to incompatible values or identities. However, other things being equal, source credibility is the foremost factor among the source characteristics that are found to affect persuasiveness. See Milburn, Michael A., Persuasion and Politics: The Social Psychology of Public Opinion (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1991), p. 107Google Scholar ; and Pornpitakpan, ‘the Persuasiveness of Source Credibility’.
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50 Tedeschi and Riess, ‘Identities’, p. 6.
51 In McGraw's accounts scheme (see ‘Managing Blame’, which deals with explanatory tactics to which public officials resort), reframing of outcomes is a form of justification. Because reframing can operate on its own or in conjunction with excuses or justification, I prefer to treat it as a separate category.
52 The actor may also partially or fully accept responsibility and apologise for an action or outcome for which it is blamed (this is variously called regret, concessions, apologies, or remediation). Although this is also a remedial tactic that is applied in a predicament of image protection, it does not have the quality of a proffered explanation that defines an account.
53 In the empirical section, I assume that these tactics can be employed by any actor who imposes blame, not just the defender. Thus, in the Second Lebanon War, human rights organisations used these tactics to impose blame on Israel, whereas the latter, in the role of the defender, applied blame imposition primarily to its opponent ‘on the ground’, Hizbullah.
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58 Bennett, ‘the Paradox of Public Discourse’.
59 See Mor, ‘Accounts and Impression Management’.
60 This is a form of what game theorists call ‘separation of types’. See Morrow, ‘the Strategic Setting of Choices’, p. 87.
61 Entman, Robert M., Projections of Power (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 5Google Scholar , emphasis deleted.
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65 Bennett, ‘the Paradox of Public Discourse’, p. 800.
66 This example also illustrates how in real-world account tactics are related in intricate ways. Thus, to invoke self-defence as a norm (justification) requires the actor also to argue that its actions were subjectively understood as such, rather than as offensive, at the time (‘we did not intend X’ in excuses) and that the actual circumstances of the event (reframing) made this understanding reasonable. Such an account may simultaneously also involve tactics of blame imposition.
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75 Myre, Greg, ‘Israel Fights Back Against War Critics’, New York Times (5 December 2006)Google Scholar , available at: {http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/04/news/israel.php} accessed 17 February 2007.
76 ‘Qana’ had a special significance in that context, since it was also the site of an 18 April 1996 incident in which an Israeli artillery shell, fired during ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ against Hizbullah, hit a UN compound near Qana and killed 106 Lebanese civilians of the 800 who took shelter there.
77 ‘Israel/Lebanon: Qana Death Toll at 28’, Human Rights Watch, Beirut (2 August 2006)Google Scholar , available at: {http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/02/lebano13899.htm} accessed 24 November 2009.
78 Ha'aretz (31 July 2006).
79 Ibid.
80 Mor, ‘Accounts and Impression Management’.
81 For a highly critical analysis of humanitarian NGOs, especially as concerns Israel, see Steinberg, Gerald M., ‘Soft Power Play Hardball: NGOs Wage War Against Israel’, Israel Affairs, 12:4 (2006), pp. 748–768CrossRefGoogle Scholar . My concern in this article, however, is not with evaluating the credibility of NGOs but rather with how they promote it in their rhetoric.
82 Hizbullah's rhetoric on Qana is not addressed in this article, although the organisation's media, especially Al Manar, was active in propagating graphic pictures from the site of the bombing. See Kalb, Marvin and Saivetz, Carol, ‘The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetric Conflict’, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 12:3 (2007), pp. 43–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar . The focus on the Israel-NGO interaction can be justified by the importance to Israel of Western public opinion, whose exposure to the raw materials provided by Hizbullah was mediated by the Western media and the humanitarian organisations. Credibility in the Israel-Hizbullah case was related more to psychological warfare and to domestic (and Arab) audiences.
83 See {http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA}. The site provides (under the title ‘terror from Lebanon’) a large collection of various documents related to the war, such as official government and military communiqués, policy statements, press conferences, media interviews, public addresses, etc.
84 See, respectively, {http://www.amnesty.org} and {http://www.hrw.org}.
85 Mor, ‘the Rhetoric of Public Diplomacy’, tested the predicaments framework for general themes of self-presentation in official texts, applying a coding protocol in a thematic content analysis.
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88 ‘Israel Defense Forces press conference following the Kafr Qana incident’, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (30 July 2006).
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 ‘Excerpts from statement by Defense Minister Amir Peretz to the Knesset’, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (31 July 2006).
92 Hoffman, ‘Israel's delay’.
93 ‘Statement by Ambassador Dan Gillerman before the UN Security Council’, Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN (30 July 2006).
94 ‘Incident in Kafr Qana’, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (30 July 2006).
95 ‘Israel Defense Forces press conference following the Kafr Qana incident’, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (30 July 2006).
96 Ibid.
97 ‘Amnesty International Missions to Lebanon and Israel’, Amnesty International, News Service # 201 (2 August 2006)Google Scholar .
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99 Ibid.
100 ‘Open letter to members of the UN Security Council on the situation in Lebanon/Israel’, Amnesty International, News Service #202 (2 August 2006)Google Scholar , emphasis added.
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103 Ibid.
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119 For the text of Stevenson's address, see: {http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/adlaistevensonunitednationscuba.html} accessed 15 January 2009. Zorin's reply can be found at: {http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/zorin3.htm} accessed 15 January 2009.
120 For details on the KAL 007 incident, see: {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#Revised_ICAO_report} accessed 15 January 2009.
121 Rosenau discusses this case and the KAL 007 incident as examples of ‘relations of proof’ in world politics. See Turbulence in World Politics, pp. 207–8.
122 Manheim, Jarol B., ‘Strategic Public Diplomacy: Managing Kuwait's Image During the Gulf Conflict’, in Bennett, W. L. and Paletz, D. L. (eds), Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 131–148Google Scholar .
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