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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING VOICE OF AMERICA
MAR 23, 2006 - 11:06AM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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In the classic 1957 film "The Incredible Shrinking Man," the character played by actor Grant Williams is enveloped by curious fog while anchored on his small boat. Within days, his clothes begin to loosen and he gets smaller by the hour. "I was continuing to shrink, to become…what? Would others follow me?" he wondered.

Yes, others would follow. The Voice of America would follow.

The VOA is shrinking almost by the hour, from an odd cloud in the Cohen Building in downtown Washington, D.C. The molecule-shrinking mist is identified by today's technology as coming from down the hall in the... FULL TEXT
 
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THE ETHICAL DILEMMA OF BLOGGING
MAR 9, 2006 - 11:39AM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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An estimated 28.8 million bloggers publish on the Internet, while by comparison there are only a paltry 2,500 U.S. daily and Sunday newspapers published. As blogging grows and matures, it needs to confront an ethical issue, as its senior ink-to-paper colleagues have, where free trips and other gratuities are offered by those who would likely expect a return on their investment.

Print journalists have strict policy guidelines to help keep their objectivity and integrity intact and to control potential conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, many still take their junkets, especially plentiful in the entertainment and tourism fields. But individual bloggers who... FULL TEXT
 
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“GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK”
FEB 27, 2006 - 12:43PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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The flight purser came back to where Fred Friendly was seated to tell him that his friend Edward R. Murrow had died an hour earlier. The plane had just cleared the Irish coast on a flight from London to New York, and the news about Murrow had been radioed from Shannon control with instructions to tell Friendly. It was April 27, 1965.

Friendly recalled in a Columbia Records album we later prepared about Murrow, that “the message was only confirmation of what Ed and his friends had expected for months.” Edward R. Murrow smoked three packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes... FULL TEXT
 
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AN EDITOR’S OPINION ON OP-EDS
FEB 26, 2006 - 11:01PM PDT
Posted by Robert A. Berger
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For 20 years I was editor of the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times. I thought I tried to maintain balance on the page, but of course some would disagree that I did so.

I never, never would have published an article by John Yoo, the Justice Department’s author of critical underpinnings for the legal case supporting torture at Guantanamo and other such extraordinary violations of international law effected by the Bush administration. (See the recent article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker). The current management of the Times has published several of Yoo’s Op-Eds without compunction.

It’s... FULL TEXT
 
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PENN KEMBLE, PUBLIC DIPLOMAT
FEB 23, 2006 - 3:36PM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
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Penn Kemble: Public Diplomat, political campaigner and international pro-democracy activist

Penn Kemble was, for thirty years an enduring presence behind the scenes of Democrat Party politics and foreign policy in the United States. Dedicated to the causes of labour and the promotion of democracy around the world. A Cold Warrior, in the 1980s he won notoriety for his support for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. His entry into the Clinton administration in 1993 was widely interpreted as an augury of that President's commitment to ending the other Cold War: that between the hawks and doves in his own party. His... FULL TEXT
 
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