“One of the great American fallacies is the notion, prevalent among people in all walks of life, that all we need to do is to explain ourselves, our policies, and our way of life to foreign peoples and they will love us — or at least will understand and sympathize with our point of view.” …
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When Public Diplomacy practitioners engage with counterparts from other nations, they must listen carefully when universal values are discussed. They must find ways to clarify goals and values when language may obscure them. Abraham Lincoln addressed this point in a plain way in his “Address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore: A Lecture on Liberty,” on…
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The Voice of America is the nation’s largest publicly-funded international broadcaster, reaching 280,000,000 multimedia users in 47 languages each week, many of whom access it daily for honest, balanced and accurate world news. To most senior VOA officials, past and present, including this writer, an unsigned White House blog on April 9, 1600 Daily, omitted…
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Imagine, for a moment, if you were responsible for covering a worldwide threat now regularly compared with World War II in its devastation and future deadly impact? As The Hill correspondent Reid Wilson reports: “The pandemic spreading across the globe has been slow to spread throughout Africa, a continent of 49 countries. But public health…
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Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian has promoted at least two blame-the-U.S. conspiracy theories about the outbreak of the coronavirus. Secretary of State Pompeo’s reaction to these allegations may have been sharp because the Chinese accusations so echo an infamous 1980s Soviet disinformation campaign – that the AIDS virus had originated at a U.S. Army…
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The March 29 edition of the Washington Post carried the sad news of the passing of one of our country’s foremost cultural diplomats: Yale Richmond. Yale’s geographic area specialization was Russia and Central Europe. When he began working in the region, Russia was still the Soviet Union and the United States referred to anything west…
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Nearly three months after the first reports of the disease in China, more than 40 countries have reported at least a thousand cases of COVID-19, with the United States, Italy, China, Spain and Germany, France, and Iran registering at least 30,000 each. Altogether, 200 countries and territories have reported coronavirus outbreaks. American media registered at…
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Around the globe, citizens and netizens are focused on the coronavirus – how not to be infected, how to prevent the virus’s spread, how it is stressing systems of medical care, and how long preventive measures must continue. The crisis has more than medical and economic dimensions, however. It has given rise to what some…
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“CRACKS APPEARING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY…AS CORONAVIRUS TERRORIZES THE WORLD” That grim headline is the opening of a program March 25 moderated by the Voice of America’s Greta van Susteren. That half hour weekly Wednesday panel is entitled Plugged In. Ms. van Susteren samples experts’ up-to-the minute assessments of global health crisis endangering millions of…
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“Churchillian.” That’s a word being used to describe the St. Patrick’s Day Ministerial Broadcast – what Americans would call an address to the nation – by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland Leo Varadkar on the coronavirus. “This is the calm before the storm – before the surge,” he told Ireland’s people. The speech is worth…
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