PD in organizational and institutional contexts

Public diplomacy faces many of the same challenges that any program or initiative tied to the government faces in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.  However, organizations and bureaucracies though generally considered with a negative connotation are necessary to gather and distribute resources. In the context of public diplomacy, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) provides a means, albeit arguably cumbersome, to directly engage foreign audiences with journalistic content. The role of the BBG in public diplomacy like any organization tied to the government is less than optimal in many ways and short of the ideal, yet provides a mechanism which otherwise may not exist.

Assessing the impact that the broadcasters are having is an extremely difficult task to undertake and likely part of the reason that the BBG is seen as being organizationally challenged. Although there are metrics showing measures of performance, namely the numbers of people each of the broadcasters reach, measuring the effectiveness of any messaging is significantly more challenging.  To improve this, one potential solution is to develop more discrete objectives for each of the broadcasters. Vague high level objectives such as “promoting U.S. interests abroad” or “advancing vital U.S. interests” cannot be measured in a way that provides a strong argument in support of or against the performance of the BBG in public diplomacy.

One solution to the perceived weakness of the BBG is to have major broadcast companies (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN) appoint members to a newly designed board of governors. This though implicitly assumes that those organizations are inherently better at promoting U.S. interests abroad than the broadcasting organizations that have been doing it for decades. Furthermore, in this suggestion, there is no empirical evidence that these organizations can do anything other than attract U.S. viewers/listeners and also limited evidence that this new governing model would enhance the journalistic integrity of the existing broadcasters.