It's mid-year report card time!

Sadly, there are some failing "F" grades thus far this year for international media, but others show improvement.

Technology is running amok, trampling public diplomacy efforts for almost everyone.

Because of its misuse by most, Satellite TV technology is worsening, rather than aiding efforts to communicate with publics abroad. The ease by which TV satellites can be accessed to distribute signals to practically anywhere, has caused professional communicators to become lazy, and to run their efforts on autopilot.

The trashing of public diplomacy is not really the fault of technology. It is the fault of those who abuse the tool, and who are dazzled to distraction by it.

Will the bubble burst on international TV satellite channels and their deep pocket financiers, as it did on the old Internet dot coms?

According to the Reuters news agency, "Cuba today started 24-hour jamming in Havana of Radio Marti, the United States' Spanish-language station transmitted from Miami, and said it would extend the jamming to the whole island."

That was back in May 1990.

"The success of any moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers," said American social reformer William Lloyd Garrison some 150 years ago. But times have changed.

The latest monthly television ratings in Saudi Arabia by the independent pollster IPSOS-STAT show al-Arabiya dramatically widening its lead over al-Jazeera as the number one satellite television news outlet for the Middle East.

In the classic 1957 film "The Incredible Shrinking Man," the character played by actor Grant Williams is enveloped by curious fog while anchored on his small boat. Within days, his clothes begin to loosen and he gets smaller by the hour. "I was continuing to shrink, to become…what? Would others follow me?" he wondered.

Yes, others would follow. The Voice of America would follow.