Nontraditional U.S. Public Diplomacy: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Deborah L. Trent, Ph.D., originally published by the Public Diplomacy Council in 2016, is now available online. Soon after 9/11, the late Representative Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, saw something was awry in America’s Public Diplomacy. “Few would assert,” he said,…
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This year marks 30 years since the Council’s establishment, and one way we are celebrating is to offer a digital version of our most recent volume, Nontraditional U.S. Public Diplomacy: Past, Present, and Future. Its online promotion is courtesy of our partner, the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. Spanning the World War One era to 2016, the book’s 11 case…
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Should ambassadors tweet? Perhaps Robert Gates implied the answer should be “no.” The memoir by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, published in 2015, remains required reading for everyone who worked at the embassies, consulates, and Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book allows readers to…
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Since last year there has been an effort at the Voice of America to expand into “investigative reporting”. The best response by VOA’s stakeholders to this effort should be a firm and unequivocal No. Why? Just look at VOA’s website. Every day this government agency distributes stories to audiences around the world that are not…
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More than seven decades ago, fascism was in its death throes. Nearly three decades ago, the Berlin Wall fell, setting in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In this century, however, those world-shaking events seem to be “history” as our nation faces an array of grave new…
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Here is the first of a series of factual updates about United States public diplomacy and broadcasting. A link to each will be posted on our Advocacy page. GUTS: USG Broadcasting Fiscal Year 2018 spending level: $793,808,000 including capital improvements 2018 audience: 278,000,000 unduplicated users a week (TV, radio and internet) Since the end of…
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What can public diplomacy staffers learn from a data scientist? A new book by a Google alumnus sheds light on how Big Data differs from opinion surveys, and how statisticians and social scientists find and use digitized public records to tease out insights on human behavior. State Department public diplomacy staffers are learning to pay…
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Some important essays and articles on Public Diplomacy in the era of the U.S. Information Agency were published in its in-house magazine, USIA World. Copies of the magazine have never been archived on the internet, so its valuable record of USIA programs and concepts is largely unavailable for reference by scholars and practitioners. In…
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Every August 28, Americans mark the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. This is a short Public Diplomacy footnote to the history of the speech, a recollection from early in my career as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Information Agency. The thumbnail description…
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For Public Diplomacy officers of a certain generation, every ceremony marking the Battle of Gettysburg and the dedication of the cemetery at the battlefield brings back some yesteryear memories. Back when U.S. Information Service libraries and centers overseas were filled with eager students and professionals, the “Gettysburg Address Speech Contest” was an annual staple of…
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