Excerpt starts at 19:22 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V92PzA6eEyM Transcript: https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-institutes-2024-sedona-forum-keynote-conversation-with-senator-mitt-romney/
SENATOR ROMNEY: Why has the PR been so awful? I know thats not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that, which is, I mean, as youve said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel. Its like, why are they not screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire and bring home the hostages. Instead, its all the other way around. I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. Whats happened here? How have they how have they/ and we/ been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Look, I mean, there are two things. One is that, look, there is an inescapable reality, and that is the inescapable reality of people who have and continue to suffer grievously in Gaza. And thats real and we have to have to be focused on that and attentive to that.
At the same time, how this narrative has evolved, yeah, its a great question. I dont have a good answer to that. One can speculate about what some of the causes might be. I dont know. I can tell you this and we were talking about this a little bit over dinner with Cindy. I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment. And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment or your house, you picked up a hard copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 6:30 or 7 oclock and watched the national network news.
Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we cant we cant discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, its overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So Id note thats of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.
Of course, this dialogue itself is a piece of propaganda since Netanyahu just admitted he refuses not to invade Rafah regardless of any hostage deal: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/30/1248276817/israel-invade-gaza-rafah-hostage-deal-netanyahu