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.

CPD Director Philip Seib was interviewed on PRI's The World this week about the power of media coverage to make the public act upon current issues.

Xinhua, the news agency run by Chinese government, joined Time Square’s glowing pantheon of corporate iconography Monday, taking the second-highest position in a tower of flashing displays for Prudential, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Hyundai.For Xinhua, the billboard highlights its shift into more visible position in New York’s media landscape.

As his country is ripped apart by a bloody civil war and rebels fight to topple him, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is trying to hire a public relations firm to improve his image. Gaddafi is looking for a spin doctor to issue daily press briefings on his 'moral' and 'legal' claims to power, as hundreds die trying to end his 42-year regime.

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.

Online, you can so easily find the thousand other people who share your perverted views. You then get a vicious spiral of groupthink, reinforcing the worst kind of ideology...totally divorced from everyday humanity. The real challenge is to work out how we can maximise the extraordinary capacity of the internet to open minds – and minimise its now evident tendency to close them.

Financial media giant Bloomberg is reportedly in talks with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia to launch a new Arabic-language business news channel--a move which could shake up foreign media and cause massive headaches for Rupert Murdoch.

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...