There’s an interesting piece to do on the intersection of the media world – made-up, filtered, and framed – and the ‘real’ world as it exists away from the lens.<\/p>\n
It would discuss the role of media in amplifying the effectiveness of terrorism<\/a>, the impact of agenda and sensationalism<\/a> on media choices. And all kinds of relatively serious things. Because it is, for-real, a serious issue.<\/p>\n But I just tripped (via the great Global Voices<\/a> blog) over something a little more whimsical – the internal conflict<\/a> over the role of the character Borat, invented by the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen (better known as Ali G) – within the Kazakh government.<\/p>\n As a recent piece in New York magazine<\/a> points out, there may even be a split in the Kazakhstani elite over Borat and his role (both positively and negatively) on the image and name recognition of Kazakhstan in the United States. The short article also suggests, however, that the real test of the tenuous relationship between Borat and the Kazakhstan government will emerge in the upcoming weeks as the public relations blitz being planned by the Kazakhstan government to publicize the country in the U.S. in the run-up to President Nazarbayev\u2019s long awaited trip to Washington clashes with the advertising blitz ongoing to promote Borat\u2019s new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan<\/a>“. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Borat, Ali G, and statecraft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}