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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.

1956 ALL THAT … U. S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND KHRUSHCHEV’S SECRET SPEECH
MAR 30, 2006 - 1:50AM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
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"[T]hrough the press section of USIS that the Communist parties themselves represented at the Moscow Congress have come to know one of the most serious and dramatic documents in the Communist literature of the world."

--Pietro Nenni, Secretary General, Italian Socialist Party, 1957

Given coincidence of the current on-going debate over the future of US public diplomacy and the fiftieth anniversary of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, it is a good moment to note the role that the organs of US public diplomacy played in heightening the impact of the speech around the world. The case is yet another set piece... FULL TEXT

THE GHOST UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
MAR 30, 2006 - 1:45AM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
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Via National Geographic

This week workers at the Brooklyn Bridge chanced upon a forgotten room containing supplies stockpiled against a nuclear attack. Dates on the materials were evocative: 1957 - the year of Sputnik; 1962 - the year of the Cuban missile crisis. This discovery is an oddly evocative interruption from the high point last long war into what future historians will doubtless see as the opening phase of the era-defining conflict. It is like a ghost in a Shakespeare play -- reminding us of just how bleak things were in the era of Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis, and how different... FULL TEXT

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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