Congressional lawmakers are scrambling to prevent America's international media arm from going off-air in China, arguing that a plan to shift much of its reporting to the Internet won't do much good in a country notorious for its web censors.

What do American comedy shows, such as South Park, an animated cartoon sitcom, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a parody of news broadcasts, have to do with public diplomacy? Well, more than you think.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera has not gained distribution on any major cable or satellite systems in the United States. On Monday, the channel will be carried in New York City for the first time, though only by subletting space from a channel owner...it is finding out that cable and satellite distributors wield an enormous amount of control over the channels that viewers in the United States can and cannot see.

Its popularity underscores the quiet success China's “soft power” push is having in unlikely locations. The Tamil station, which broadcasts every day from a modest 12th floor office, has more than 25,000 registered listeners ... in Tamil Nadu and the rest of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore...

Voice of Russia, Russia’s state-funded radio station, is taking a new approach to informing Americans: using American and Russian voices to broadcast international news from American soil. For the first time since its beginnings in 1929, Voice of Russia will broadcast to Americans...

APDS Blogger: Kimberly DeGroff Madsen

That’s largely the case for the U.S. government’s most expensive foreign broadcasting effort: the Arabic-language news channel Alhurra. Since the television station was founded in 2004, the U.S. has sunk close to a billion dollars into it.

“Both Australia Network and Radio Australia represent a significant public investment in public diplomacy objectives,” he declared. “When you look at the expansion of international broadcasting as an arm of soft diplomacy, governments are using their public broadcasters to do this work...."