The CPD Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars and practitioners from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect CPD's views. For blogger guidelines, click here.

For all the growing interest in public diplomacy, the field still suffers from a lack of specificity in use of the term. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it is a source of confusion. A look at the CPD blog demonstrates the wonderful breadth of issues that fall under the rubric of public diplomacy. A survey of peer-reviewed literature from the last five decades yields more than 600 articles employing the term – each with its own understanding of public diplomacy.

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.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee came out swinging this morning in its hearing titled “Broadcasting Board of Governors: An Agency ‘Defunct.’” Chairman Ed Royce laid the groundwork in his introductory remarks, offering an overview of the BBG’s legislative origins and the proud history of U.S. government broadcasters that helped the West win the Cold War.

I recently returned from the annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Chicago where suddenly everyone’s talking about public diplomacy. Or at least, using the term. It calls to mind a favorite movie quote: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”.

The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program has been around since 1987. This program, the largest component of which places native English speakers in Japan’s junior and senior high schools for year-long tours of duty as Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs), has thousands of alumni from around the world – more than 20,000 from the United States alone.

In late June, The Washington Post had an article highlighting efforts by the American Embassy in Islamabad to correct the record when inaccuracies about the United States appear in the Pakistani press.

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