Alex Rodriguez recently wrote an excellent page-one piece in the Los Angeles Times, examining broad distrust among Pakistanis regarding the United States’ plans to expand its well-fortified embassy in Islamabad.

It is received wisdom among those who monitor the ebb and flow of national reputations that major movements are rare. The cartoon crisis of 2005 sent Denmark into a nose-dive. The end of apartheid in South Africa lifted that country into a new league. Mostly the rankings have been surprisingly stable, with France, Germany and the United Kingdom jostling for the top slot in the leading index, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index.

In Washington last week I sat down with a group of bloggers to interview two smart and savvy foreign correspondents. The fact that they were women, representing influential media from the Middle East, made their views interesting on several levels.

Nadia Bilbassy is a correspondent with MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Co.) and Joyce Karam is with London-based Arabic language daily Al Hayat. MBC owns Al Jazeera.

The response by individuals using Twitter to the Iranian election provides important perspectives for the scholarship and practice of Public Diplomacy.

Since last June’s election in Iran, updates of developments have appeared on Twitter alongside messages of support for protesters and celebratory tweets when websites from one side or the other were taken down. This spawned a number of press articles focusing on Iran’s Twitter Revolution.

“Public Diplomacy: Ideas for the War of Ideas,” by MIT political scientists Peter Krause and Stephen Van Evera, was published in Middle East Policy, Fall 2009. The authors' ideas follow five themes: U.S.

The title for this commentary is deliberately borrowed from Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s famous piano composition of 1874. It also underscores the tone for this review of a recent exhibition that has opened in Los Angeles, “The 21st Century Family of Man: Photography as Public Diplomacy,” on display in the second floor gallery of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

A huge banner with a photo of David Plouffe festooned a media conference I attended in Croatia last week. The former Obama campaign manager is coming to Zagreb later this year and those running local election campaigns are eager to welcome “the unsung hero” who “helped restore the trust in the United States of America.”

Salman Ahmad, Pakistani rock musician and founder of the popular band Junoon (as well as doctor, author, and film maker) explained last Saturday night to the standing room only crowd in the General Assembly of the United Nations that it was the video which pushed him into action. The video, of two men holding down a teenage girl while another beat her, sent by a friend from Pakistan, prompted Ahmad to fly to Pakistan from New York, his adopted home, to find the answer to the question that was tormenting him: "Which was the real Pakistan?"