During the street demonstrations in Tunis, amidst the signs demanding “Ben Ali Out” were placards saying “Thank you, Al Jazeera.” The Qatar-based pan-Arab television network has never been allowed to open a bureau in Tunisia – a prescient if ultimately unsuccessful tactic by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s government...

Briefly, opening with “I got a hold of your show on the web and I was so impressed with the heart of it,” Jon Stewart began his interview with Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi, two U.S. Government employees – and U.S. public diplomats – behind “Parazit”, a Voice of America program aimed at Iran.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors is considering asking commercial broadcasters to donate their news programming to Voice of America and other international broadcasters.

That was the word from Dana Perino, a new member of the BBG board.

"Everyone agrees we should look into this," she said. "How do we repurpose things that we could acquire?"

Featuring 61 languages, CIBN will be a convergence of a website, online broadcaster, network television and mobile service terminal. It's set to become a new state-level broadcasting organization that caters to audiences from all over the world, thanks to the rapid development of the Internet and mobile communication technology.

“Hope” is the first lesson the Arab street is learning through the Tunisian experience. For decades, the Arab peoples have been depressed, felt helpless and had to live with the injustices, the failures and repressions of their post-colonial states. For the first time, an Arab people, Tunisians, have won against one of their regimes. The event had an echo among all Arab peoples. Many of them felt this strengthened their trust in themselves and their hope in the future.

Several years ago, I became interested in the origins of the Voice of America. I had worked there in 1942 but wanted to supplement my recollections with written facts. The quest for the truth turned out to be far more complex than I ever could have imagined...

Turkish soap operas have conquered the Balkans reversing Turkey's negative image with the Balkan nations from the time of the Ottoman yoke, according to Austrian paper Der Standard. Turkey's film industry is not only making money from the showing of its soaps in Balkan countries... but it is also helping out the Turkish diplomacy, the newspaper says in an article entitled "Ottoman Television Runs Like Clockwork."

Last month, NBC announced it had bought the Voice of America, as we noted at the time. NBC planned to use the name for a weekly musical series that will premiere on the network in a few months to compete with "American Idol." We also speculated that even sophisticated viewers here and in other countries might confuse the NBC "Voice of America" musical with that other Voice of America, the U.S. government's international broadcaster.