You have entered the world of Games and Public Diplomacy

Welcome! The purpose of this space: to document my research on the potential of video games in the realm of public diplomacy.  With the rise of “info-tainment”, “edutainment” and political marketing, there has been merge between politics and popular culture. One burgeoning form of popular culture is that of video games. As technology advances and this interactive media becomes more and more sophisticated, the reach and influence of video games is expanding exponentially. Can institutions utilize video games and massively multi-player online games to promote public diplomacy? Read More

Bad Press on Karen Hughes’ Middle East Listening Trip May Be Premature

While State Department official Karen Hughes was wrapping up her listening tour of the Middle East, an important session of United Nations representatives was taking place in Geneva. Ms. Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was assessing how the United States government might better communicate with Arabs and Muslims abroad. The U.N. meeting was tackling the issue of how much authority the United States ought to have in overseeing world information that would help the United States do so. Read More

Hurricane Katrina - Domestic and Foreign News Broadcasters View Things Differently

There are at least two versions of what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and other Gulf cities -- of the flooding, the death and breathtaking destruction, and of the governmental response. Sharply different stories are being told, one by domestic broadcasters, the view from their bubble; the other by foreign broadcasters, as seen from their bubble. Read More

Sgt. Lizzie’s Army,  A New Face on the Iraq War

During the invasion of Iraq and for several months afterward, there were 700 embedded reporters with U.S. and coalition troops. Literally thousands of stories flowed from those reporters: from inside battle zones; from the streets of Baghdad where a young person would be observed rubbing the sole of the shoe on a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein dragged through the street; from dancing crowds enveloping coalition troops. All this in news reports helped shape early public perceptions about the Iraq war. Read More

Hollywood, Bollywood, and the Iraq War

More movies are produced in Bollywood than in Hollywood, or anywhere else on earth. Some 900 films per year are released from Bollywood, in the teeming commercial hub city of Mumbai, known for centuries as Bombay, in India. Read More

The Talented Mr. Babitsky, World’s Hottest Broadcaster

The hottest news broadcaster these days is not one of the American network news anchors. He is not even an American, but a Russian. His name is Andrei Babitsky ("The Evening News, with Andrei Babitsky"?) He is, of all things, a U.S. government-funded employee, a broadcast news correspondent for the congressionally-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Read More

Putin Tries to Block VOA and Other Foreign Broadcasts from Russian Audiences

It's back to Cold War days at the Voice of America. The Russian government is still trying to block VOA programs from entering the country, but not succeeding totally. During the Cold War, a Soviet Union "jammer" would transmit static over the radio frequency of a foreign news broadcast aimed for audiences behind the Iron Curtain to render the radio signal inaudible. Broadcast interference is much more sophisticated as practiced in today's Russia, and the VOA and other international programmers are once again being put to the test. Read More

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