Main Page | Month Archive | Email Updates | RSS Feed

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.

Posts by Alvin Snyder

THE CHANGING VOICE OF AMERICA
OCT 27, 2006 - 10:19AM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
All posts by this author

Events moved rapidly this week at Voice of America. VOA director David Jackson decided to give his managers a heads up, shocking them with the news that he was planning to move on soon That's exactly what happened. Within days the entire VOA staff saw the announcement that Jackson was indeed leaving. The supervisory Broadcasting Board of Governors accepted Jackson's resignation and approved a successor, who would arrive on the job a couple of days after that.

The BBG acted faster and more efficiently than it had in years.

David Jackson, previously a 23-year career senior journalist with Time magazine,... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (6) | Add Your Own

AMERICA’S ARABIC NEWS CHANNEL GAINS AUDIENCE
OCT 13, 2006 - 1:32PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
All posts by this author

The American government's satellite news channel, Alhurra, while still well below the audience ratings of the well-entrenched Arabic TV news channels, appears to be catching on with audiences in the Middle East.

During this summer's Israel-Hezbollah war, which greatly boosted TV news viewing habits throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, Alhurra finally earned mention in honest-to-goodness competitive TV audience surveys, one conducted in the Middle East's largest commercial marketplace, Saudi Arabia. Previously, Alhurra relied on its own commissioned TV surveys which provided cumulative audience figures over a week or two, without listing the competition's cumulative audience size, or Alhurra's competitive... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (3) | Add Your Own

PSY-OPS JOURNALISM: WASHINGTON’S BUDDING NEW INDUSTRY
OCT 7, 2006 - 7:20AM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
All posts by this author

The war in Iraq has spawned a new industry in Washington that could be called Psy-ops Journalism. The new breed of journalists are following the money trail to the Pentagon.

Some $400 million in media consulting contracts has been awarded during the past few years by the Pentagon, for the purpose of helping "to effectively communicate Iraqi government and Coalition goals with strategic audiences." Thus far both the Pentagon and its contract psy-op journalists have experienced a painful learning curve, but the most recent contract award will show how much each has learned. The outlook is not promising.

A practical... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (3) | Add Your Own

AMERICA’S PUBLIC DIPLOMACY BROADCASTS BECOME AN ELECTION ISSUE
SEP 27, 2006 - 6:04PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
All posts by this author

With U.S. elections little more than a month away, America's public diplomacy has been cast into the fray. By an odd coincidence, on the same day President Bush charged that a classified intelligence report on Iraq had been leaked to the New York Times to embarrass the administration leading up to the November elections, another news organization published an exclusive story regarding U.S. public diplomacy.

McClatchy Newspapers reported it got access to a Pentagon study, also available to Congress, that charged the U.S. government's broadcasts to Iran are not "confrontational" enough. The next day, the New York Times, which had... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (2) | Add Your Own

PART TWO: WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT REQUESTED YOUR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY ADVICE?
SEP 21, 2006 - 10:45AM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
All posts by this author

Here is more from those who played along with our fantasy of receiving a call from the president -- this or any president -- who then asks advice on how to improve America’s public diplomacy.

As President Theodore Roosevelt once observed, those who choose to go "in the arena" experience both "victory and defeat," and we have, each of us, had our share of the latter, but happily some of the former, so why not share our experiences for those now in the arena?

Our initial posting of comments from battle-wisened hands were published even as additional remarks came forward.... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (7) | Add Your Own

Previous posts « First  <  3 4 5 6 7 >  Last »