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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.

Posts by Alvin Snyder

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND THE RATINGS GAME
APR 28, 2006 - 2:33PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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"The success of any moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers," said American social reformer William Lloyd Garrison some 150 years ago. But times have changed.

Ratings matter whether in the medium of television, the internet, or radio. The Nielsen company does website ratings just as they do for television programs. In the digital age numbers count, and in the field of international broadcasting, this has been true from the earliest days of shortwave broadcasting. As Radio Netherlands icon Jonathan Marks once observed, countries began international radio services "to tell the world what a great place their country was, providing... FULL TEXT
 
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AL-ARABIYA’S RATINGS LEAD INCREASES
APR 17, 2006 - 1:24PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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The latest monthly television ratings in Saudi Arabia by the independent pollster IPSOS-STAT show al-Arabiya dramatically widening its lead over al-Jazeera as the number one satellite television news outlet for the Middle East.

The United States government's choice to give al-Arabiya an exclusive interview with Donald Rumsfeld could be an effect of the lead increase. At one time, al-Jazeera was the go-to news outlet for Middle Eastern viewers and the U.S. used the popular network as a public diplomacy tool. However, it looks as if both viewers and U.S. officials have found a new favorite.

Audience figures for March 2006... FULL TEXT
 
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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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