For more than a decade, American public diplomacy has centered around Joseph Nye’s soft power approach. This approach is based on the assumption that nations can win global hearts and minds of foreign citizens by highlighting the attractiveness of its culture, political values, and foreign policy. To this end, public diplomacy officials have allocated billions of dollars into a variety of soft power programs such as cultural and educational exchanges, foreign aid and development, and English language instruction.

The end of the Cold War changed the nature and mission of international broadcasting. But Congress correctly saw a continued role for such broadcasting to serve U.S. foreign policy by delivering targeted news and information to places where local media still provide an incomplete picture at best and leave citizens unable to make informed decisions. After adding broadcasts from Radio Marti to Cuba in 1985, and TV Marti in 1990, Congress created the International Broadcasting Bureau in 1994. Then came Radio Free Asia in 1996 and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks in 2004.

Three BBC correspondents based in three of India's largest cities have complained to the corporation's director-general, Tony Hall, about the size of their redundancy offers. Ram Dutt Tripathi, who works in Lucknow, Mohammed Omer Farooq (Hyderabad) and Manikant Thakur (Patna) have asked why they are not entitled to the same pay-off terms as other BBC staff.

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Al-Jazeera’s rude reception in Cairo probably reflects a perception that has been building since even before Morsi and his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, won and lost power in Egypt over the past year: that al-Jazeera and its owner, the royal family of the oil-rich Persian Gulf state of Qatar, have been supporters of Morsi and the Brotherhood. With Egypt now deeply divided, those alleged loyalties have cast al-Jazeera into disfavor among Egypt’s anti-Morsi faction.

Cambodia has overturned a much-criticized order banning local radio stations from broadcasting foreign programs ahead of general elections. The Ministry of Information said in a statement late Saturday that it was reversing the June 25 directive following "requests" but did not elaborate.