This is my speech to communication officers of the World Bank in Washington, DC, May 20, 2010. The title I would give it is “How Power Handles Public Scrutiny.”
The talk is about four strategies by which powerful people and institutions try to cope with the demand for public inquiry into what they do, which of course is in the first step in accountability. We could also called these “phases” in the relationship between power and scrutiny, especially scrutiny from the press but increasingly from the public itself. All phases are still with us; all appeal to powerful actors at different times and in different settings:
1.) Hiding from the press and declining to appear to in public at all. As with the boss who says, “Just keep me out of the newspapers.”
2.) Impression management, also known as public relations. It features the controlled release of information. (Here I discuss the historically fascinating case of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 after World War I, in which all the leading statesmen brought publicity advisers with them, then a new thing.)
3.) Transparency and openness, meaning the de-control and release of the same information that power uses to understand itself, as with the open data movement, which has reached the Bank.
4.) Secrecy by complexity amid opaque and sprawling systems, where it becomes impossible to figure out what’s going on.
Each of these has implications for the main business communications officers of the World Bank are in, which is maintaining the legitimacy of the institution before key constituencies. I discuss those implications before concluding with four “maxims” for understanding new media. “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one and new media means anyone can own one.” “Open systems don’t work like closed systems.” “The sources can go direct.” “Audience atomization has been overcome.”
My talk begins about 3:45 in the above clip. It’s 27 minutes, then there is 35 minutes or so of Q and A, a lot of which is about the decline of the traditional press and how big institutions should handle criticism in the more wide open world of the Web.
