Some of America's rival broadcasters have expressed outrage at the fact that the BBC World Service Trust has applied for the US government funding to help combat censorship in countries like China and Iran.

Recent strategic decisions by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts to China suggest that the time has come for Congress to take a serious look at the way the U.S. government manages its international broadcasting services.

News flash: “We are in an information war, and we’re losing that war.” This source for this conclusion was not one of the at least 15 reports on U.S. public diplomacy that have appeared over the last decade...

As the Cold War was ending in the late 1980s and early '90s, Western nations, confident of a lasting peace, began to neglect the tools that had sustained them in the ideological war against communism. In the US, institutions of public diplomacy and strategic communications were disbanded...

"New media and old media converge to become now media." That maxim, so persuasively articulated by 21st century public diplomacy guru Matt Armstrong, has now become real in a Voice of America Persian language television program called Parazit.

The voanews.com website was back to normal when I checked. Using Google cache, I found the hacked version, work of the "Iranian Cyber Army," which apparently went after all VOA sites.

But when that fails, the Broadcasting Broad of Governors, which oversees the government-owned media organizations that send pro-American messages to foreign audiences, has begun using social media to go around online restrictions in repressive countries. Perhaps the most important? Facebook.

Adam Powell reports in his most recent CPD Blog post that the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors plans to investigate expanded program acquisitions for use overseas on the Voice of America and perhaps other U.S. government non-military international broadcasts under its aegis