I am happy to see that Alvin Snyder is contributing again to the CPD Blog. I have always learned from his experience and have found his views to be interesting and provocative. His return commentary, about a revival of Worldnet, accordingly provoked me to add some thoughts about the possibilities for a public diplomacy television service.

It's unfortunate that President Ronald Reagan's global interactive TV Network, Worldnet, no longer exists as it did two decades ago when he stood at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and dared Soviet leader Gorbachev to "tear down this wall".

When USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy embarked on its Virtual Worlds project a few years ago, I admit to being somewhat sceptical. The undertaking seemed, at the time, just too ephemeral, too abstract, too distant from the machinations of realpolitik and the grind of bureaucratic process which I experienced daily as a diplomat.

My thinking, not unlike internet applications, has since migrated.

Public opinion holds more sway now than at any previous time in history. Information and communication technologies are cheap and ubiquitous. It is in this context that the United States must increasingly engage, persuade and attract the cooperation of foreign publics to achieve its national interests. Yet, the United States must do this in a world that has changed markedly in the years since its public diplomacy institutions were created.

With help from USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy and hundreds of other individuals and groups, I recently authored a Brookings Institution report on public diplomacy and what it should look like in the coming years and decades. That report is available on-line at Voices of America: U.S.