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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 Nicholas J. Cull

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY GOES ‘PUBIC’
JUL 11, 2007 - 11:29AM PDT
Posted by John H. Brown
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No, the above title doesn’t have a typo, a typo that occurs (to the embarrassment of those responsible for it, and to the amusement of those noticing it) when referring to that increasingly widespread international activity, public diplomacy (PD) -- which can be defined, to cite the U.S. State Department homepage, as "engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences." Today an instrument of many governments in their foreign policy, public diplomacy has become global, some forty years after the term was coined by the American diplomat Edmund Gullion during his tenure as dean at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy in... FULL TEXT
 
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THE PARADOXES OF PROPAGANDA
APR 16, 2007 - 9:16AM PDT
Posted by John H. Brown
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When I give my course, "Propaganda and US Foreign Policy" (1) -- a historical overview of the subject -- I like to invite the class for a modest buffet dinner chez moi. The last time this get-together took place, it included a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), a film -- considered by some a propaganda classic -- that celebrates the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. As the students ate their dessert, I turned on the DVD, and the Nazi director's troubling yet spectacular black-and-white images appeared.

One member of the class remarked that the movie's... FULL TEXT
 
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WORLDCASTING: U.S. FAILS TO FIGHT RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP OF VOA/RADIO LIBERTY NEWS BROADCAST
JUL 13, 2006 - 1:40PM PDT
Posted by Alvin Snyder
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To be or not to be -- A 'Re-Jiggered' U.S. Information Agency

That is the question, or one of them anyway, as to how America's public diplomacy efforts may be ratcheted back up to speed.

My recent "F" grade to those who pine for a reassembled USIA is challenged by former Director Bruce S. Gelb, who headed the U.S. Information Agency from 1989-91. He contends that:

… [A]ll the "transformational" BS and the re-jiggering of the half-man half-beast organization that purports to be the 21st century upgrade of the once effective USIA just doesn’t work and cannot work period.

IRAQ: THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK
JUN 1, 2006 - 1:56PM PDT
Posted by Adam Clayton Powell III
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"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

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

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