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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 John H. Brown

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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TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT PROPAGANDA
JUN 29, 2006 - 4:30PM PDT
Posted by John Brown
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The greatest lure of propaganda, for those using it to achieve total victory in the so-called war on terror, is that on surface it may appear to pose no intellectual problems about what it is and what it does. Drop leaflets on enemy territory; place pro-U.S. articles in newspapers abroad; broadcast radio programs that attack the enemy and praise American values -- and hearts and minds in hostile lands will be won over, like a salivating Pavlov dog reacting to food-related stimuli. But propaganda is not as simple as that. In fact, with its long history, it is a complicated... FULL TEXT
 
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