Digital sites like La Pública in Bolivia, El Pitazo in Venezuela and global site Rising Voices are establishing relationships with low-income, rural and indigenous communities. The idea is to produce their own news agendas different from those of traditional media. The sites give voice to community problems and support the creation of media that come from the communities.

An FBI probe will tell us more about the current email intrusion, although it will take time before we know exactly who (and if Russia) is potentially behind hacking into the DNC's network. But one thing is certain: The Russians have been perfecting the art of manipulating information in recent years to sway public opinion within Russia and around the world in the hopes of building up the stature of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Soft power – broadly a country’s ability to persuade other nations to cooperate without recourse to force – has long been a tool of Western foreign policy,  but in recent years Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has introduced his own much less benign variant of the initiative. 

Today, Edward R. Murrow’s name is synonymous with integrity in journalism. He reported from the frontlines during World War II and took on Joe McCarthy’s communist witchhunt in the 1950s. But what’s less well known to Americans today is his role as the country’s leading propagandist in the early 1960s. A new book by Gregory M. Tomlin called "Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration" seeks to remedy that.