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It is amusing to see so many analysts and journalists try to pour cold water over this important development," Ali Shihabi tweeted. "A whole industry had emerged to take advantage of this split and that will dry up."
https://f24.my/7EKN.T via @FRANCE24
https://f24.my/7EKN.T via @FRANCE24
I watched Qatar's PR game in Washington go from virtually zero in June 2017 to far ahead of the Quartet in mere months. The first mistake of the Quartet was to totally screw up the launch of the boycott in its PR messaging
Quartet should have released the 2013/14 agreements at the EXACT moment of the boycott to properly explain its reasons. Instead they accused Qatar of "supporting terrorism" which fell on deaf ears in the West and hence the fallacy that this was a pointless boycott was spread.
After that Qatar went out to recruit virtually everybody available to its "team". Analysts, journalists, Think-Tanks got invitations, got paid to talk and write and got contributions and hence a whole crop of "supporters" suddenly emerged.
Qatar's existing strong media infrastructure like Jazeera, MEE etc and others helped greatly, also as vehicles to discretely work with people and reward them. The quartet was beaten by Qatar in the PR space completely.
At the end of the day the Quartet failed in its messaging from minute one of the crisis. It then produced the "13 demands" which sounded ridiculous and only gave Qatar more ammunition to fire back.
Demanding closure of Al Jazeera, for example, was totally unnecessary and only got journalists riled up about "press freedom". Suddenly Royal Qatar was seen as upholding "freedoms" and "liberties".
This whole crisis was a case study in the complete failure and incompetence in communication/PR by the Quartet.
