MAP Director Khalil Hachimi Idrissi and some other executives of the news agency and Iran’s Deputy Culture Minister for Press Affairs Hossein Entezami announced the resumption of MAP activity during the meeting in Tehran on Tuesday. “The government has special regard for the development of media activity and also for a boost for media in private sector, because it deems media diplomacy one of the pillars of the public diplomacy,” Entezami said at the meeting.

If it wasn’t inevitable, the threat was clearly lurking on the horizon. And now, legislation that would eliminate the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) [...] and de-federalize the Voice of America (VOA) has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Blowing up the Board and converting the 74-year-old VOA into a non-governmental entity, the kind of drastic reform which one congressional aide reportedly described as “the nuclear option,” is now on the table.

China Daily's deputy editor-in-chief Kang Bing said Fairfax Media's presence in both Australia and New Zealand "means the influence of China Daily will be spread to cover the two most important countries in Oceania", adding that China's "soft power could drive the wheel of its friendship with Australia and New Zealand", according to quotes carried by the Chinese newspaper.

From visiting mosques and cycling to performing in soap operas, a number of foreign ambassadors in Indonesia have developed their own diplomatic strategies to get closer to the local people. US Ambassador Robert O. Blake Jr. snatched the opportunity to interact with a greater number of Indonesians by appearing in Salam, a new religious soap opera series on the private TV station RCTI. 

The BBC then is central to the branding mobilisation of public neutrality. The degree to which this branding of neutrality has come naturally to Britain with the long ‘culturing’ of physical empire can be readily tracked. It is seen in the way London itself has become a degree zero of nation-branding.

The Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica (PBCJ) recently struck a deal with China Radio International (CRI) to share educational content, documentaries and a television series produced by the Chinese media entity, to be aired in Jamaica. [...] The documentaries will highlight the culture and lifestyle of Chinese people, which falls within the focus and mission of the PBCJ “to promote culture and heritage alongside with values and attitudes”

China has reasons to feel it can use outbound tourism as a soft power to influence foreign policy. Governments across the world are adjusting their visa and other regulations to welcome the rising tide of Chinese tourists.

The South Korean side said the China-South Korean relations are at their historical best, the two sides have enjoyed close high-level contacts, and cooperation in the sectors of economy and trade as well people-to-people exchange has yielded fruitful results.