Propaganda v. Propaganda: An Explanation of Kony 2012
By now it’s safe to say that anyone in America with a Facebook and at least two Facebook “friends” has seen Invisible Children’s KONY2012 campaign video. If you haven’t seen it then you’ve probably at the very least seen someone share the video through a status update. If for some strange reason you’ve managed to dodge the viral campaign completely then I’ll break it down for you.
As with all of their campaign videos—at least one a year now—they take a bravado approach. That is they take a very strong emotional and outright stance in delivering the information they want you to obtain from their cause. The video immediately opens up discussing the cause of their organization which you can read about yourself at www.invisiblechildren.com for yourselves. The narrator and co-founder Jason explains that it is their belief that the reason this man has not been found—a man who is at the top of the International Most Wanted list—is because there is a lack of awareness. In large part this is correct for Americans. Until yesterday Joseph Kony was hardly a recognizable name. In that respect the organization succeeded in a day. At the creation of this video, however, they still needed to garner that attention. To try and once again emotionally connect with the viewer as well, as making a point about the children for whom the organization was founded, Jason records a simple explanation of Kony’s actions to his five-year-old son. The duration of the video is spent showing clips of individuals from outlying groups talking about the importance of this cause as well as highlight the importance of awareness alone. By creating awareness and garnering just enough spotlight the founders met with Obama and set into action a plan to send 100 military advisers—not soldiers with guns—to aid the local military in how to handle the ground search. The conclusion of the video calls the viewer to action and announces a planned date in which they can take to the streets together for the cause. This plan has gone widely ignored by critics who claim that watching the video gives a false sense of entitlement to the target audience. For those who have watched the video, they understand there is more to be done. They’re simply biding time.
(So that’s the gist of the video. I didn’t slant it…it is propaganda. For any educated college student you’ve learned that not all propaganda is bad. This is certainly of the well-meaning type.)
Now that the video itself is out of the way I’d like to talk about some of the specific issues that some critics took up with Invisible Children. Since they almost all adhere to the finances of the organization I will break this down by individual financial complaint. I will then tackle the moral issues involving the use of military force.
Firstly, the accusation that only 31% goes to charity and the remaining 69% simply benefits the three founders and their own individual causes. Critics have accused them of using money to fund only their personal travel expenses and used the money to fund a personal filmmaking company. If you take a look at the financial plans and audits fully disclosed for you on the website you will find that in the last fiscal year nearly 1 million dollars was spent on travel expenses. I’d like to call shenanigans on anyone who wants to claim that a million bucks was spent on three men alone for travel. Yes, intercontinental travel is expensive as is made clear in their audit, but it isn’t THAT expensive for three men who don’t take private flights. If each ticket is 2,000 dollars a piece they’d still have to fly 100 times to reach the 200,000 dollar mark per person. Simple multiplication shows the absurdity in such a claim. Now this 1 million dollarsactuallycovers the travel costs of the Ugandan people—who in all honesty have more wherewithal than any of us to comment on this—to fly to and from the U.S. to advocate their cause. This also covers the cost of the road crews who dedicate their own time to traveling the country for this cause and NOT get paid as staff members. When you fly ten Ugandans, an unknown number of Americans and the three founders back and forth from Uganda a couple times a year then the numbers start to add up, but don’t pull numbers out of context to create a counter cause. As for the accusations that they use some of that money to fund their private movie company, I’d like to blow another whistle. None of these three men are Hollywood players and they could be. They are obvious masters of editing and emotional storytelling, but no they use that to create films that have purpose and call for change. Sure that’s a bit idealistic, but in reality that’s what it takes. Because political “HOPE” is basically down the drain. And it only takes four years for someone to screw that up, but in the 9 years since IC have started they’ve done nothing but good. And the majority of it was a result of their “private film company”.
What about the financing of the staff members then? If the money doesn’t just benefit Jason, Laren and Bobby then who benefits from staff pay? They have an entire staff of individuals who all serve their own important causes at a home base in San Diego, CA. These jobs range from IT all the way to Human Relations. The non profit world isn’t built much different than the rest of the world. When it comes to staffing, all the grounds still need to be covered or else risk spending money on exterior professionals to solve issues outside your payroll. They’re killing all the birds with one stone. We can all agree that it’s a much more efficient business plan. However, they don’t just pay their staff members here in America. In Uganda they also have a sister base where they have Ugandan citizens on staff benefiting from that extremely greedy 69%. Now you see that they’ve created jobs and as any good job-creator should do they follow through by paying their employees both domestic and international. With all these staff members that limits the gross income for each of these three men to something that probably looks more like $50-75k a year which is not an astoundingly large amount of money for someone making a career of what they are doing.
One of the other strange things I came to learn about in reading this critiques was that there is a rating board which rates charities on a four-star basis. Pretty simple, I’ll admit. I’m sure plenty of things go into these ratings…but the thing that the critics accuse them of which they say links to their 2/4 rating is that they won’t submit to an audit for public viewing. That information itself is incorrect. The founders are aware of their low rating and they are aware of why it is low.
“Our Accountability and Transparency score is currently at 2 stars due to the fact that Invisible Children does not have 5 independent voting members on our board of directors—we currently have 4.”
So their communications with this rating board have been misconstrued by the individuals trying to take light away from the organization by laying blame for their rating on an entirely different issue—an untrue issue at that.
*UNFINISHED*
