This week we are running a film that first aired on Al Jazeera English six months ago, on another one of Al Jazeera English programmes, Witness. It is the story of two Russian bloggers, Sergei Mukhamedov and Irina Gundareva, who use their blogs to expose corruption and challenge the established order in the different areas in which they live. Mukhamedov is based in Moscow and says he set up his LiveJournal blog to skirt the restrictions on freedom of expression put in place by President Vladimir Putin.

When Ismail Sheikho recalls his days at the Silopi refugee camp in Turkey--for Iraqi Kurds escaping Saddam Hussein’s 1992 crackdown--he remembers waiting all day just to hear the 15-minute Kurdish news broadcast of the Voice of America (VOA). “I bought a radio back then just to listen to the news,” says Sheikho, remembering that at the time the VOA was just about the only international broadcaster offering a Kurdish service.

For a brief period on Thursday morning, the Washington Post's website redirected some visitors to a webpage controlled by the Syrian Electronic Army. In a brief statement, the site didn't indicate how the infiltration occurred, but subsequent reports suggest that the hackers were able to manipulate a content recommendation service The Post uses on its site.

The combination of Al Jazeera and America doesn't exactly sound like a match made in Heaven, or Jannah for that matter. But that's not stopping the deep-pocketed media giant, funded by the government of Qatar, from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to once again try to build a presence in the United States. On Tuesday, Al Jazeera launches Al Jazeera America, an ambitious news network that hopes to challenge CNN, Fox News and MSNBC on their own turf.

Al Jazeera enjoys the best economic model you can possibly have," says Philip Seib, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California, who has written books on Al Jazeera. "They have a lot of money. They want to be a global player. They want Qatar to be a global player. And to be a true global journalistic force, you have to reach the U.S.

I've been a writer and observer of all things American propaganda ever since I worked at the United States Information Agency in Washington. On Monday, August 12th at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, I found two unlikely kindred spirits who share my interest in the subject, especially as it relates to what we know or think we know about American foreign policy.

Very little coherent information is currently coming out of the parts of northern Nigeria under a state of emergency. What information is available indicates that activity and violence continue under the cover of the media silence, though it is difficult to judge its degree. In May, cell phones and satellite phones did not operate in the affected areas. Those services are only slowly being restored. Foreign media are almost entirely absent, and domestic media appear to be highly restricted. Foreign diplomats do not travel there.

Last week, for the first time ever, there was a panel dedicated to discussion of public diplomacy at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Held in Washington, DC the conference, and this panel in particular, offered an opportunity for scholars to talk about the emergence of public diplomacy as a subject of study in the discipline.