by Nancy Snow
August 1, 1997
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Key Points
• The USIA performs the public diplomacy function of U.S. foreign policy through its USIS posts, exchange activities, information programs, and international broadcasting.
• The agency’s primary public diplomacy mission in the post-cold war world is to influence foreign audiences by promoting the private sector interests of U.S. corporations seeking increased market share overseas.
The United States Information Agency (USIA) is a foreign affairs agency in the executive branch of the U.S. government. The agency is responsible for explaining and supporting U.S. foreign policy, interests, and values abroad through diplomatic posts known as the U.S. Information Service (USIS), exchange activities such as the Fulbright and International Visitor programs, information programs, and international broadcasting. In April 1997 the Clinton administration announced a plan to integrate the USIA into the State Department in response to congressional Republican pressure to streamline U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy. Under this plan the USIA is scheduled to be officially embodied with the State Department by October 1, 1999.
The agency’s legislative mandates are delineated in the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, which were enacted to promote mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and other countries. In 1994 Congress enacted the International Broadcasting Act, which consolidated all nonmilitary U.S. government international broadcasting under the USIA. This includes the Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti, Worldnet television, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. Most controversial among these is Radio Marti, which went on the air in 1985 and is considered to be completely under the influence of Mas Canosa and the ultra-conservative Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). TV Marti is effectively jammed by the Castro regime despite a U.S. taxpayer investment of more than $100 million. Its transmission signal comes from a balloon above the Florida Keys that also operates radar to track U.S.-bound drug flights. When TV Marti’s signal goes on, the drug smuggling radar goes off. Radio/TV Marti is scheduled to be moved to Miami in 1997, thereby allowing Mas Canosa and the CANF to increase their control over the broadcasting.
Until the 1990s the mission and function of the USIA was considered inseparable from cold war geopolitics, whose main purpose was “to win the battle of men’s minds” against Soviet propaganda. In a 1993 address former national security adviser Anthony Lake signaled the start of a new rationale. Lake announced that “the successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement—enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”
The USIA began its post-cold war free market mission in the mid-1980s by funding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). Since ratification of NAFTA in 1993 and with U.S.-Soviet tensions no longer a viable rationale for its continued existence, the agency has embraced trade and economics as its primary mission. The “Clinton doctrine” firmly established economic policy as the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Under USIA Director Joseph Duffey, the agency responsible for “telling America’s story to the world” began a new post-cold war mission of commercial engagement. “One of the most important areas for enhanced agency activity is that of business, trade, and economics. More and more, we are teaching others not only about the principles of free markets but the very mechanisms that make free markets and open trade possible,” Duffey told the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations in 1993.
Agency objectives are increasingly linked to economic liberalization. For 1998, the USIA lists its foreign policy goals as: NATO expansion (which is expected to create a boom market for U.S. arms makers); the promotion of human rights and democracy through democratic and market reforms in the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe; anticrime and antiterrorism information along with advisory programs for radio broadcast in cooperation with the Department of Justice and the FBI; collaboration with the Drug Enforcement Administration to create public affairs programming; protection of intellectual property rights with a long-term goal targeting China; and trade and economics through a focus on trade liberalization and deregulation, economic cooperation, and building confidence in and support for NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Problems with Current U.S. Policy
Key Problems
• The USIA downplays, almost ignores, its critically important second mandate to explain the rest of the world to the American public.
• The USIA acted as America’s press agent for the Clinton administration’s effort, in collusion with Fortune 500 companies, to urge NAFTA passage in Congress, disregarding the concerns raised by the anti-NAFTA coalition.
• The USIA has built ties to the U.S. business community through several deal-making conferences that link U.S. businesses to their overseas target markets.
The USIA’s primary mandate is to influence foreign audiences about U.S.-style democracy and markets. Its lesser known second mandate, often downplayed if not ignored, is to explain what the rest of the world is about to the American public and “to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” This secondary role is stipulated by Fulbright-Hays and Smith-Mundt legislation and is carried out through USIA’s educational and cultural exchange programs. Under the principle of mutual understanding, post-World War II government-funded educational exchanges like the Fulbright program were designed, according to Senator J. William Fulbright, to provide “some hope that the human race wouldn’t commit suicide.”
President Carter attempted to highlight the second mandate by directing the USIA to “undertake no activities which are covert, manipulative, or propagandistic.” Carter redesignated the USIA as the U.S. International Communications Agency (USICA) to signal something more than a one-way propaganda agency. Such efforts were short-lived. In 1981, former Reagan fundraiser (and later USIA Director) Charles Z. Wick reemphasized USIA’s propaganda function but now labeled the agency’s activities with the innocuous term “public diplomacy.” Under Wick, the agency compiled a black list of U.S. citizens whose views diverged from Reagan’s in order to purge such views from USIA publicity. Wick also launched the Project Truth campaign (authorized by the National Security Council) to refute Soviet disinformation. He also hired veteran CIA official Walter Raymond to coordinate democracy-building efforts in Eastern European countries. Under Wick, the agency’s budget mushroomed by 42% in its first fiscal year, stabilizing by 1989 at approximately one billion dollars, where it remains. Except for a passing reference to mutual understanding, the Bush administration reinforced one-way information to assist other countries in understanding and supporting the American capitalist way of life.
Under Clinton’s tutelage, international exchange and public diplomacy have become useful tools to promote free-market economies, free trade, American competitiveness, and U.S.-style democratization. This mini-Commerce Department approach is in marked contrast to “warmer” cold war days under Carter when cultural affairs were designed to reflect the soft or nonadversarial dimension of international relations and foreign policy. Unfettered by bottom-line pressures, the interaction of individuals across cultures could stand on its own merits as a powerful educational tool. Now there is a hard sell behind America’s storytelling.
Nowhere is the selling of America’s story more prominently displayed than in USIA’s assistance in the successful passage and continued promotion of NAFTA. In Mexico, the USIA proclaimed that it worked to show the most influential segments of Mexican society that U.S. interests in Mexico ran much deeper than mere profit margins. The USIA reasoned that “by nurturing American interest in and respect for Mexican intellectual and cultural values and accomplishments, we could build a social base for economic and political cooperation while disarming Mexico’s greatest potential opposition to NAFTA.” The USIA thus became an instrument to promote NAFTA both in Mexico and in the U.S. through targeted International Visitor Programs that brought key Mexicans to the U.S. and key U.S. citizens to Mexico to meet with pro-NAFTA sectors. In a six-week period during October and November 1993, USIS-Mexico received six congressional delegations.
As a propaganda organization for NAFTA, the agency may have benefited from efforts made by Director Duffey’s superlobbyist wife, Anne Wexler. Her firm, the Wexler Group, spearheaded the U.S. Fortune 500 lobby called USA*NAFTA in its national campaign to convince the American people that NAFTA meant more American jobs and at higher wages. Voice of America (VOA) editorials extolled the job-creation magic of NAFTA, which has not lived up to its Cinderella predictions. All this intense lobbying relegated to footnote status the voices of other Americans with dissenting stories to tell about NAFTA.
From its inception, USIA’s second mandate, to teach Americans about other countries, has been circumscribed by the Smith-Mundt prohibition, which bans USIA employees from targeting a U.S. audience through the VOA or other information and from broadcasting programs designed for an overseas audience.
While anyone with a modem can gain access to the USIA and its VOA website, this 1948 ban continues due to congressional pressure, particularly from Foreign Relations Committee chair Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who frets about propaganda being used for domestic purposes, and from the U.S. broadcast lobby, which wants no competition from government-owned broadcasts like the BBC in Britain. Such a ban clearly violates the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens and makes it impossible for the American public to express its opposition to or support for taxpayer-funded USIA programs.
Despite this domestic ban, the U.S. business community has been targeted during the Clinton years by USIA-sponsored conferences designed to build commercial ties between the U.S. and countries like South Africa and the former Soviet Union. Such conferences, which bring together USIA and Commerce Department officials, business investors, and members of Congress, call into question the agency’s stated principle of mutual understanding. By overemphasizing U.S. business and commercial values instead of more broadly shared goals of cultural diversity and free expression, USIA’s message comes across as narrow and exploitative to many people around the world whose aspirations are quite different.
Toward a New Foreign Policy
Key Recommendations
• The USIA should work with its supporters to raise the profile of its second mandate by overturning the obsolete Smith-Mundt ban on domestic dissemination of agency materials.
• If the agency continues to function as a cultural Commerce Department, it should be abolished.
• When the USIA is reorganized into the State Department, it should develop programs to promote true mutual understanding among the world’s peoples rather than narrowly cast its energies on U.S. business interests overseas.
The plan to collapse the USIA within the State Department does not solve the fundamental problems that mark this information agency. If the USIA is to survive reorganization into the State Department, it must rekindle its second mandate to increase mutual understanding and start to paint a picture of America with a broader brush. Agency documents link America’s success to USIA’s ability “to convince other peoples of the benefits of open markets… and the soundness of U.S. policies on other economic issues.”
USIA’s model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to the rest of the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of the world’s poor is strictly monitored and controlled. But such a package projects an image of America which speaks first and foremost for the Fortune 500 corporations, its primary beneficiaries, with little interest or respect for workers and communities in other countries and cultures.
It is the Commerce Department’s role, not USIA’s function, to sell America to the rest of the world. America is, after all, not just for the selling. Millions of private citizens, both here and abroad, are using their collective vision to promote a one-world community—not a one-world market—where diverse cultures are united in efforts to combat poverty, oppression, pollution, and collective violence. In contrast to USIA’s boardroom-style globalization, many of these citizen activists favor more freedom of movement for people and greater regulation on the movement of capital. This global grassroots vision is not based on classical economic theory and its orthodox devotion to limitless growth. Instead, it takes into account people, their cultural and natural environments, and local economies where traditional nonmarket values like reciprocity, mutual aid, and self-reliance build community bonds.
Such global visions, if they were distributed as part of USIA’s second mandate to tell the rest of the world’s story both here and abroad, would more truly reflect the core principle of mutual understanding. One solution is to campaign for reform of USIA broadcasting so that the VOA is truly educational, similar in style to the BBC at its best. Despite the rise in the television market, shortwave radio is still the world’s primary instrument of communication and education, particularly in the global South. An education-oriented VOA could help alleviate regional tensions in conflict areas like Bosnia and Central Africa. Solutions to global problems might also shift from competitive zero-sum game models to win-win options that include recognition and support for countries and cultures that seek independent models of democracy and development.
There are strong arguments that the USIA is an ineffective, obsolete organization that should be abolished not reformed. The arguments for abolishing USIA include the following:
• The USIA has no legitimate post-cold war function. Under Clinton it predominantly serves the interests of U.S. corporations by touting to foreign audiences the superiority of U.S. commercial values and the soundness of U.S. economic policies.
• The USIA is neglecting its second mandate, citing Smith-Mundt restraints that prohibit dissemination of USIA material in the United States.
• USIA operation as a mini-Commerce Department makes for duplication of government services in a post-big government era of downsizing and budget cuts.
• Private hucksterism for U.S. business interests under the guise of public diplomacy makes a mockery of USIA mandates for mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and the people of other countries.
Its proposed merger with the State Department will reduce what little independence the USIA has as a foreign affairs agency. As the U.S. government agency responsible for distributing America’s story, the USIA should find the political courage to establish a vision for improving the human condition through two-way personal contacts and cultural exchanges that stand on their own merits without needing validation by linkage to U.S. business objectives overseas. The story of America that the USIA currently shares assumes that the rest of the world wants to be just like us. The greater story that USIA has yet to tell the world is that America can also listen and learn.
by Nancy E. Snow
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United States Information Agency
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/17/22
[x]
Seal of the U.S. Information Agency
[x]
Logo of the U.S. Information Agency
Agency overview
Formed August, 1953
Dissolved October 1, 1999
Superseding agency
State Department,
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Broadcasting Board of Governors
Jurisdiction Federal government of the United States
Headquarters Washington, D.C.
The United States Information Agency (USIA), which operated from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, prior to the reorganization of intelligence agencies by President George W. Bush, President Bill Clinton assigned USIA's cultural exchange and non-broadcasting intelligence functions to the newly created Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. USIA's broadcasting functions were moved to the newly created Broadcasting Board of Governors. The agency was previously known overseas as the United States Information Service (USIS) of the U.S. Embassy; the current name, the Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, is sometimes translated as the Public Relations and Cultural Exchange Agency.
Former USIA Director of TV and Film Service Alvin Snyder recalled in his 1995 memoir that "the U.S. government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America‘s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a 'tower of babble' comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year". "The biggest branch of this propaganda machine" was the USIA.[1]
Stated mission
[x]
A propaganda poster produced by USIA, exhorting Northern Vietnamese residents to move South, in 1954.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the United States Information Agency in 1953, during the postwar tensions with the communist world known as the Cold War.[2][3] The USIA's mission was "to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions, and their counterparts abroad".[4] The USIA was established "to streamline the U.S. government's overseas information programs, and make them more effective".[4] The USIA was the largest full-service public relations organization in the world, spending over $2 billion per year to highlight the views of the U.S. while diminishing those of the Soviet Union, through about 150 different countries.[2]
Its stated goals were to explain and advocate U.S. policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign cultures; to provide information about the official policies of the United States, and about the people, values and institutions which influence those policies; to bring the benefits of international engagement to American citizens and institutions by helping them build strong long-term relationships with their counterparts overseas; and to advise the President and U.S. government policy-makers on the ways in which foreign attitudes would have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of U.S. policies.[4]
During the Cold War, some American officials believed that a propaganda program was essential to convey the United States and its culture and politics to the world, and to offset negative Soviet propaganda against the US. With heightened fears about the influence of communism, some Americans believed that the films produced by the Hollywood movie industry, when critical of American society, damaged its image in other countries.[5] The USIA "exist[ed] as much to provide a view of the world to the United States as it [did] to give the world a view of America".[6] Films produced by the USIA could by law[specify] not be screened publicly within the United States. This restriction also meant that Americans could not view the material even for study at the National Archives.[7]
Within the US, the USIA was intended to assure Americans that "[t]he United States was working for a better world".[8] Abroad, the USIA tried to preserve a positive image of the U.S. regardless of negative depictions from communist propaganda. One notable example was Project Pedro. This secretly funded project created newsreels in Mexico during the 1950s that portrayed Communism unfavorably and the United States positively.[9] Articles reflecting the views promoted by the USIA were frequently published under fictitious bylines, such as "Guy Sims Fitch".[10][11]
The agency regularly conducted research on foreign public opinion about the United States and its policies, in order to inform the president and other key policymakers.[12] It conducted public opinion surveys throughout the world. It issued a variety of reports to government officials, including a twice-daily report on foreign media commentary around the world.[12]
Media and divisions
[x]
USIA library in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1965, during the apartheid era.
From the beginning, President Dwight Eisenhower said that "audiences would be more receptive to the American message if they were kept from identifying it as propaganda. Avowedly propagandistic materials from the United States might convince few, but the same viewpoints presented by the seemingly independent voices would be more persuasive."[8] The USIA used various forms of media, including "personal contact, radio broadcasting, libraries, book publication and distribution, press motion pictures, television, exhibits, English-language instruction, and others". Through these different forms, the United States government distributed its materials more easily and engaged a greater concentration of people.[6]
Four main divisions were established when the USIA began its programs.[5]
• Broadcasting information
• Libraries and exhibits
• Press services
• Motion picture service
The first division dealt with broadcasting information, both in the United States and around the world. The radio was one of the most widely used forms of media at the onset of the Cold War, as television was not widely available. The Smith–Mundt Act authorized information programs, including Voice of America.[13] Voice of America was intended as an unbiased and balanced "Voice from America", as originally broadcast during World War II. The VOA was used to "tell America's stories ... to information deprived listeners behind the Iron Curtain".[2] By 1967, the VOA was broadcasting in 38 languages to up to 26 million listeners.[6] In 1976 VOA gained its "Charter", requiring its news to be balanced.
The second division of the USIA consisted of libraries and exhibits. The Smith–Mundt Act and the Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961 both authorized international cultural and educational exchanges (including the Fulbright Scholarship Program). USIA would mount exhibitions in its libraries overseas to reach people in other countries. "Fulbrighters" were grant recipients under the USIA educational and cultural exchange program. To ensure that those grant programs would be fair and unbiased, persons of educational and cultural expertise in the grant subject areas selected the grantee recipients.
The USIA's third division included press services. Within its first two decades, the "USIA publishe[d] sixty-six magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals, totaling almost 30 million copies annually, in twenty-eight languages".[6]
The fourth division dealt with the motion picture service. After the USIA failed in its effort to collaborate with Hollywood filmmakers to portray America in a positive light, the agency began producing their own documentaries.[2]
Non-broadcast educational and information efforts
By the time the agency was reorganized in 1999, the educational and informational efforts encompassed a wide range of activities, outside of broadcasting. These were focused in four areas, the agency produced extensive electronic and printed materials.
• Information service
• Speakers and Specialists Program
• Information Resource Centers
• Foreign press centers
Its The Washington File information service, was intended to provide, in the words of the agency "both time-sensitive and in-depth information in five languages", incorporating full transcripts of speeches, Congressional testimony, articles by Administration officials, and materials providing analysis of key issues. The Agency also ran a number of websites to transmit information.[12]
Second, the agency ran a "Speakers and Specialists Program", sending Americans abroad for various public speaking and technical assistance roles.[12] These speakers were referred to as "American Participants" or "AmParts".
Third, the agency operated more than 100 "Information Resource Centers" abroad. These included some public-access libraries in developing countries.[12]
Finally, the USIA-operated foreign press centers in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles to "assist resident and visiting foreign journalists". In other major American cities, such as Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Seattle, the USIA worked cooperatively with other international press centers.[12]
Beginning with the 1958 Brussels World Fair, the USIA directed the design, construction, and operation of the U.S. pavilions representing the United States at major world Expos.[14]
Abolition and restructuring
The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, Division G of the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999, Pub.L. 105–277 (text) (PDF), 112 Stat. 2681-761, enacted October 21, 1998, abolished the U.S. Information Agency effective October 1, 1999. Its information and cultural exchange functions were folded into the Department of State under the newly created Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.
When dismantled, the agency budget was $1.109 billion. After reductions of staff in 1997, the agency had 6,352 employees, of which almost half were civil service employees in the United States (2,521). About 1,800 of these employees worked in international broadcasting, while approximately 1,100 worked on the agency's educational and informational programs, such as the Fulbright program.[12] Foreign service officers comprised about 1,000 members of the work force. Broadcasting functions, including Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti, Radio Free Europe (in Eastern Europe), Radio Free Asia, and Radio Liberty (in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union), were consolidated as an independent entity under the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). This continues to operate independently from the State Department. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some commentators characterized United States international broadcasters, such as Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America as United States propaganda.[15][16][17]
See also
• WORLDNET Television and Film Service
• Committee on Public Information
• Crusade for Freedom
• Cultural diplomacy
• Clandestine HUMINT operational techniques
• Nine from Little Rock, an Academy Award-winning documentary by Charles Guggenheim, commissioned by the USIA[18]
• U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs
• Foreign Broadcast Information Service
• Arthur Kimball, initial, acting, director of the agency
• Leo P. Ribuffo
References
1. Snyder, Alvin (1995). Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War: An Insider's Account. New York: Arcade Pub. p. xi. ISBN 1-55970-321-0. OCLC 32430655.
2. Snyder, Alvin, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War 1995. Arcade Publishing, Inc. New York.
3. Reorganization Plan No. 8 of 1953, 67 Stat. 642
4. J"USIA: an overview". USIA. August 1998. Retrieved November 24, 2008.
5. Lefever, Ernest. Ethics and United States Foreign Policy (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1957).
6. Robert E. Elder. The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968).
7. "The Wall (1962) - Film Notes ", National Film Preservation Foundation.
8. Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. 2006. University Press of Kansas. Lawrence, KS.
9. Fein, Seth. "New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way." Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5, November 2004, pp. 703-748. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2004.00447.x. JSTOR 24914821.
10. Novak, Matt (September 27, 2016). "Meet Guy Sims Fitch, a Fake Writer Invented by the US Government". Gizmodo. Retrieved September 27, 2016.
11. Wilson P., Jr, Dizard (2004). Inventing public diplomacy: the story of the U.S. Information Agency. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. p. 159. ISBN 9781588262882. Retrieved September 27, 2016. These commentaries were prepared by a group of USIA editors (...) A long-running commentary on economic developments was attributed for many years to a fictional Guy Sims Fitch, whose views were often cited authoritatively in overseas publications.
12. "USIA Factsheet". USIA. Retrieved April 18, 2011.
13. Friedman, Norman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000).
14. The United States Information Agency: A Commemoration (PDF). USIA. 1999. p. 38. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 7, 2011. Retrieved April 18, 2011.
15. Snow, Nancy (1998). "The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948". Peace Review. 10 (4): 619–624. doi:10.1080/10402659808426214. ISSN 1040-2659.
16. Hopkins, Mark (1999). "A Babel of Broadcasts". Columbia Journalism Review. 38 (2): 44. ISSN 0010-194X. 'The U.S. is propagandizing the world with a jumble of wasteful, redundant radio and TV programs – Voice of America, Radio Free This-and-That.
17. Smyth, Rosaleen (2001). "Mapping US Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century". Australian Journal of International Affairs. 55 (3): 421–444. doi:10.1080/10357710120095252. ISSN 1035-7718. S2CID 153524399. '... in a separate category, the 'non-profit, grantee corporations' Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia (RFA). Although it is claimed that this arm's-length structure acts as 'a firewall, protecting editors and reporters from government and congressional censorship' this is something of a fiction as the broadcasters are funded by Congress and expected to serve clear foreign policy purposes-which they do, in the case of the surrogates in particular, with missionary zeal.'
18. "The Charles Guggenheim Collection". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 10, 2012.
Further reading
• Bardos, Arthur, "'Public Diplomacy': An Old Art, a New Profession", Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2001
• Bogart, Leo, Premises For Propaganda: The United States Information Agency's Operating Assumptions in the Cold War, ISBN 0-02-904390-5
• Cull, Nicholas J. "The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989", ISBN 978-0-521-81997-8
• Gerits, Frank, “Taking Off the Soft Power Lens: The United States Information Service in Cold War Belgium, 1950–1958,” Journal of Belgian History 42 (Dec. 2012), 10–49.
• Snow, Nancy, Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World, ISBN 1-888363-74-6
• Kiehl, William P. (ed.) "America's Dialogue with the World", ISBN 0-9764391-1-5
• Sorensen, Thomas C. "Word War: The Story of American Propaganda" (1968) ISBN 3-530-82750-9 ISBN 978-3-530-82750-7
• Tobia, Simona "Advertising America. The United States Information Service in Italy (1945–1956)", LED Edizioni Universitarie, ISBN 978-88-7916-400-9
• United States Information Agency, Commemoration Booklet Public Diplomacy: Looking Forward, Looking Back, Commemorative volume, 1999
• Yoshida, Yukihiko, Jane Barlow and Witaly Osins, ballet teachers who worked in postwar Japan, and their students, Pan-Asian Journal of Sports & Physical Education, Vol.3(Sep), 2012.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to United States Information Agency.
• Records of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the National Archives
• Archive of agency Web site
• Papers of Abbott Washburn (Special Assistant to the Director of the USIA, 1953 & Deputy Director of the USIA, 1953–1961), Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library Archived January 14, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
• The short film Answering Soviet Propaganda (1964) is available for free download at the Internet Archive.