Articles by Helle Dale

 

BBG Budget: Voice of America Slashed, Fewer Broadcasters, More Bureaucrats

Helle Dale | April 12, 2012

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) recently released its 2013 budget request, which slashes Voice of America (VOA) funding by more than $17 million while… Read More

 

Urgent Challenges for New Public Diplomacy Chief

Helle Dale | April 09, 2012

Rolling up her sleeves should be new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Tara Sonenshine’s first act in office. For the chief of the U.S. government’s outreach… Read More

 

Al-Qaeda’s Service Interruption: Long May It Last

Helle Dale | April 03, 2012

Al-Qaeda’s main Web forums have been offline for the past 11 days and counting. No government has taken credit, but if this “service interruption” actually… Read More

 

Snails-Pace Senate Finally Moves on Public Diplomacy Chief

Helle Dale | April 02, 2012

Belatedly, last week, the new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Tara Sonenshine, and a bundle of other diplomatic nominees received the Senate stamp of approval. Having… Read More

 

Obama and Medvedev: Best Friends Forever

Helle Dale | March 28, 2012

Imagine a foreign leader, visiting the White House, being overheard and captured on microphone whispering conspiratorially to the U.S. President that he intends to undermine… Read More

 

House to Hear about Chinese Public Diplomacy

Helle Dale | March 28, 2012

There used to be a saying about the Chinese: “They work while we sleep.” In the field of public diplomacy, it is absolutely spot on…. Read More

 

Punch Drunk in the Oval Office

Helle Dale | March 28, 2012

Could someone get the President some new speechwriters? President Obama is woefully in need of new vocabulary, as a recent expose by Danish television hilariously… Read More

 

American Avatar: A Discussion of the Many Images of the United States

Helle Dale | March 26, 2012

American exceptionalism is term that sticks in the craw of many foreigners. “Aren’t all countries exceptional?” they say. At the same time, though, most people… Read More

 

Iranian Broadcasting Targets Latin America

Helle Dale | March 07, 2012

Challenges to U.S. international broadcasting and public diplomacy continue to mount. Iran, joining China and Russia, also nourishes ambitions as a global power and is… Read More

 

Chinese News Makes Inroads in U.S.

Helle Dale | March 05, 2012

Chinese TV has taken a page from Al Jazeera’s playbook. With sparkling new offices in Washington, D.C., on New York Avenue since February 6, and… Read More

 

America’s Complicated Relationship with Pakistan

Helle Dale | February 29, 2012

The rioting in Afghanistan resulting from the inadvertent incineration of several copies of the Quran at a U.S. military library has hammered the home the… Read More

 

Syria’s (Literal) Information Warfare

Helle Dale | February 24, 2012

To hide its myriad of other crimes, the Syrian government is determined to prevent news of its atrocities against its own citizens from getting out…. Read More

 

Quieting the Voice of America

Helle Dale | February 23, 2012

More than 30 years have passed since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the “Soft Voice of America” in an article that first appeared in National Review… Read More

 

Syria’s War on Free Speech

Helle Dale | February 16, 2012

The Syrian government’s sickening attacks on its own people continues unabated. Syrian government troops are pushing into the city of Daraa, where resistance is currently… Read More

 

Salon’s “Big Neo-Con Lie”: Burning the Straw Men

Helle Dale | February 16, 2012

The rest of the world has woken up to the fact that Iran is a problem on a large scale. Salon magazine, however, is determined… Read More

 

Iranian Bloggers on the Frontline Against Oppression

Helle Dale | February 09, 2012

Blogging in Iran is a high-risk activity, and it is getting ever more so by the day. As the Iranian regime feels the pressure from… Read More

 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: The State Department’s Digital Revolution

Helle Dale | January 31, 2012

The U.S. State Department has jumped into the world of online communication with a vengeance. January 2012 has been designated 21st Century Statecraft month, and… Read More

 

Iran: Fair Question or NSC Admission of Failure?

Helle Dale | January 31, 2012

Did the Obama Administration miss a golden opportunity in the summer of 2009 to support the demonstrations of the Iranian Green Movement and maybe even… Read More

 

Obama v. Obama: The President Takes Aim at Himself

Helle Dale | January 25, 2012

Those who might have nodded off after the first hour of President Obama’s third State of the Union address were surely brought back to consciousness… Read More

 

Tweeting for Hearts and Minds

Helle Dale | January 09, 2012

January 2012 is the U.S. Department of State’s “21st Century Statecraft Month.” What the State Department has in mind in this case is what former… Read More

 

Syria’s Media Crackdown: No End in Sight

Helle Dale | December 10, 2011

Syria remains a holdout in the Middle East against the forces of popular discontent. The regime of Bashar al-Assad has so far stayed in power… Read More

 

“Virtual” Tehran Embassy Not Worth State Department’s Time

Helle Dale | December 08, 2011

President Obama got his hand slapped when he famously stretched it out to the Iranian regime in the early days of his presidency. Now the… Read More

 

Feasibility Study Rubber-Stamps U.S. Broadcasting Merger

Helle Dale | November 23, 2011

Don’t say the wheels of government always spin slowly. When there is an agenda at work, they can move with considerable speed, and in the… Read More

 

The Audacity of Obama’s Big Book Promo

Helle Dale | November 02, 2011

After President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, U.S. embassies around the world apparently felt that foreigners still did not know enough about… Read More

 

The Decline and Fall of Obama’s Foreign Policy Czars

Helle Dale | October 24, 2011

Whatever became of President Barack Obama’s vaunted foreign policy czars, who were to transform America’s international relations through soft power diplomacy? The answer is nothing… Read More

 

Microblogging: The Latest Challenge for China’s Censors

Helle Dale | October 18, 2011

China has the dubious distinction of being one of the most controlled information environments in the world. Yet even China’s army of censors can at times… Read More

SecurityNews

Foreign Affairs, Anyone? Department of State Reaches Out to Americans

Helle Dale | October 17, 2011

In its never-ending efforts to be hip, the U.S. State Department last week launched a new Web site called “Discover Diplomacy.” It has video clips,… Read More

 

New Technology and the Arab Revolt

Helle Dale | October 04, 2011

Political and technological changes have a history of going hand in hand. Technology empowers individuals to overcome their isolation and connect to share ideas, information,… Read More

 

Senate Committee to BBG: Hands off China Broadcasting

Helle Dale | September 30, 2011

Of the countries that present the greatest foreign policy challenges to the U.S. and will do so in the decades to come, China has to… Read More

 

The U.S. in the Obama Era: Superpower or Doormat?

Helle Dale | September 27, 2011

Sometimes the writing on the wall is 10 feet tall, and you have to be willfully blind not to see it. The September attack on… Read More