The Government has acknowledged the importance of “soft power” in global politics with an unprecedented £85m investment in the BBC World Service to support initiatives in Russia, North Korea, the Middle East and Africa. Lord Hall, the BBC Director-General, welcomed what he described as “the single biggest increase in the World Service budget ever committed by any government.”

The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group's media emir, and the site of that day's shoot.His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.

When the German publisher Don Stone approached Heba Amin to paint Arabic graffiti on the set of Showtime's series Homeland, her initial impulse was to decline, as others had before her […]  [Instead, she] painted statements such as "Homeland is racist" on the set and then put out an artists' statement. The story went viral and has been covered by more than 60 media outlets in numerous languages.

The Ohio governor announced his idea in a foreign policy speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., "I will consolidate them [U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting] into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share".

Ahead of a Senate committee hearing tomorrow (Nov. 17) on options for changing the structure of U.S. government broadcasting, [John Lansing, the new CEO and Director of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors] said one idea in particular makes no sense:  Dividing the governing structure into two separate, independent boards would only lead to confusion and wasted effort.

Cultural diplomacy is also an essential tool for challenging claims of ‘cultural superiority’ by celebrating human differences and recognizing other cultures and values [...] It is toward this perception of culture that Qatar's diplomatic energies have been redirected over the past decade.