Lessons from the Past - USC Center on Public Diplomacy

<strong>Lessons</strong> <strong>from</strong> <strong>the</strong> <strong>Past</strong> 21
to trade <strong>the</strong>ir modern knowledge for experience of Japanese culture.
Japanese diplomats routinely use <strong>the</strong> term ‘exchange’ to refer to <strong>the</strong>
entire world of public diplomacy.
2.5 International Broadcasting (News)
International broadcasting (IB) is an actor’s attempt to manage
<strong>the</strong> international environment by using <strong>the</strong> technologies of radio,
television and Internet to engage with foreign publics. Commercial
international broadcasting may still be regarded as PD, but it is PD
for <strong>the</strong> corporate parent, which can warp its output or insist on rigid
objectivity according to its desired ends. Both commercial and statefunded
IB can affect <strong>the</strong> terrain on which all PD is practiced: witness
<strong>the</strong> rise of Al Jazeera in <strong>the</strong> late 1990s. IB work as practiced by states
can overlap with all <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r PD functions including listening in
<strong>the</strong> monitoring/audience research functions, advocacy/information
work in editorials or policy broadcasts, cultural diplomacy in its
cultural content and exchanges of programming and personnel with
o<strong>the</strong>r broadcasters. The technological requirements of international
broadcasting are such that <strong>the</strong> practice is usually institutionally
separate <strong>from</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r Public Diplomacy functions, but <strong>the</strong> best reason
for considering international broadcasting as a parallel practice apart
<strong>from</strong> <strong>the</strong> rest of PD is <strong>the</strong> special structural and ethical foundation of
its key component: News.
Historically, <strong>the</strong> most potent element of IB has been its use
of news, especially when that news is objective. This aligned <strong>the</strong>
entire practice of IB with <strong>the</strong> ethical culture of domestic broadcast
journalism, and turned IB into a mechanism for diffusing this culture.
Some IB has sought to use alternative ethical sources and models
for its content, as with <strong>the</strong> Arab state-funded religious broadcasting.
Here <strong>the</strong> broadcasts were judged according to religiously-based
ethics. The aim was not so much proselytizing for Islam as boosting
<strong>the</strong> image of <strong>the</strong> state by associating it with a worthy activity.
While IB proper dates only <strong>from</strong> <strong>the</strong> mid-1920s (with <strong>the</strong> Soviet
Union and <strong>the</strong> Ne<strong>the</strong>rlands leading <strong>the</strong> field) it is possible to find