The American
State Department Headquarters in Washington DC
incredibly important tool for bettering America’s image abroad. A key function of public diplomacy, he said, is countering misinformation spread about the United States. Armstrong said he supports calls to provide professional development training for specialists in public diplomacy.
Face-to-face contact
Another report, The Collapse of American Public Diplomacy, surveyed former officers of the U.S. Information Agency. Author Kathy Fitzpatrick, a professor of public relations at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says that USIA’s integration into the State Department in 1999 was a mistake. Fitzpatrick, a professor of public relations at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, said the United States needs a public diplomacy entity that is independent of the State Department and provides the “kind of autonomy, flexibility, and freedom of movement that the USIA had.” The professor, who is writing a book about the future of public diplomacy in the United States and worldwide, said that to depoliticize the public diplomacy effort, the United States must “figure out a way to transcend administrations with public diplomacy rather than have it reflect the current administration’s policies.”
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One problem with U.S. public diplomacy today, she said, is the “emphasis on ‘selling.’ Public diplomacy should be about relationship building, not selling particular messages,” Fitzpatrick says, and praises what USIA’s director (1961-1964) Edward R. Murrow, dubbed “the last three feet” - interpersonal relations with people abroad. Joseph Nye, an international relations professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says that he also considers the demise of USIA a mistake. Nye, author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, said that recreating USIA would cost a new U.S. president political capital. Nye says that capital would be better invested in a White House coordinator and strategist for public diplomacy. Using new media in public diplomacy poses the danger that slick messaging will come across as propaganda, Nye warns. The most important part of public diplomacy is “faceto-face relations,” and “catchy stories help draw attention, but slick production values do not produce credibility. A broad range of opinions, including dissent, creates credibility,” he says. Nancy Snow, associate professor of public diplomacy at Syracuse University, told America.gov that her employment with USIA in the 1990s made her a “fan of having an independent agency of the U.S. government responsible for telling America’s stories to the world.” Snow, whose books include Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World, said USIA and the State Department “have different objectives.” USIA, she said, was a “bit of a water carrier” by delivering, rather than creating messages; the State Department makes policy. “The intermixing of the two doesn’t seem to be working.” “We need to study what other countries are doing” on public diplomacy, Snow said, “and not copy their ways, but put together a toolkit of best practices.” See America.gov for the full versions of many of these articles.