There’s been a growing tendency lately (particularly on BBGWatch, an online watchdog) to compare, unfavorably, VOA’s performance, as measured by number of stories or live reports from the scene of breaking news, with other national and international news organizations. Behind much of this criticism is an implicit expectation that VOA’s coverage should be as fast…
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The First Monday Forum on July 2018: Nelson Mandela Centennial, featured a panel of speakers: Dr. Bob Wekesa from the department of journalism and mass studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; Ron Nixon, the Homeland Security correspondent for The New York Times and author of, Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda…
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This is the second in a series of factual updates about United States public diplomacy and broadcasting. You’ll find a link to each of these on our Advocacy page. Public Diplomacy Field Operations Overseas operating costs in Fiscal Year 2017: $493 million* More than 4100 personnel: 700 Foreign Service and 2600 Locally Employed Staff (2018)…
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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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