In 1963 in a testimony before a Congressional Committee, Edward R. Murrow, who was the Director of USIA, stated: “American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.”
Public diplomacy has often been under debate. Typically, with America being the world superpower, American officials have not seen the need for public diplomacy. It was widely used during the Cold War in an attempt to counter balance the Soviet Union and their diplomacy efforts. After that, it was drastically reduced, and the opinion of America became bad through most parts of the world (aka 9-11 happened). At this point, America realized the value of public diplomacy and reinvested money.
This is where it gets interesting, think back to the Murrow statement. America needs to be truthful to gain a good public image abroad. The Iraq war started, and its intentions were completely unrelated to why the media and government officials said we were going to war. This created huge amounts of dislike for America, from countries that typically do agree with us, let alone the ones that already don’t like us! The best part of this all, is that the American public diplomacy acts were unveiled to be not credible or truthful stories. Leaked classified documents admitted the U.S government were planning on planting news items in foreign news, falsifying the foreign news, and sending journalists pro-U.S. news stories. This department was quickly closed, however similar stories were leaked a few years later of the military doing similar acts.
This undermines the entire point of being truthful that Murrow makes! In order to eventually gain a more positive public America is going to have to be much more truthful. With as much transparency that there is now, and with the huge possibility of things like wikileaks occurring, it’s time to step up the game, and be the honest truthful international player.
Kristin R
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Tallk's Blog: A discussion of IC 
This is post is interesting, as it distinguishes “truthful” from “transparent” in the context of US propaganda and public diplomacy. I think it is certainly the case that US information operations strategically message “truthful” information from a very US perspective, however this is not definitively transparent. Additionally, public diplomacy exists as a way to present an authentic depiction of American values, models, and culture to other nations, though this image is never a complete picture of US prerogatives.
Is there really any truthful international player out there though? And even if American public diplomacy became more like our diary and we put it all out there, I’m not so sure our international classmates wouldn’t use it to destroy us. Public diplomacy is used to get a counry’s image out there, but I don’t think any country is, according to Maslow, self actualized enough to put only the truth out there. I’m not saying I agree with our public dip strategy either, I think its gotten us in some deep doo doo and as someone who likes to travel, it gets a little disheartening when you find out people really do believe the stereotypes. I think a good public diplomacy starting place for the US would be to put our feet in our mouth less, but because of the damage that has already been done to our image, by ourselves and others, I think the truth would hurt.
Public Diplomacy is a very tricky issue. I have done some traveling and you know what’s the best way to change someone’s image of the U.S.? For them to actually meet someone from the U.S., someone who isn’t in a television screen drinking coffee at their local cafe on a couch with five of their closest friends or a man behind a podium with a big white house on it making a public speech. 9 times out of 10 these are the images people had in their heads of Americans being just like stock sitcom people or completely agreeing with a man at a press conference espousing views of his America that don’t necessarily convey the views of the nation as a whole. I happened to do my travels during George W. Bush’s terms and sometimes my friends and I pretended we were from Canada in order to avoid the criticisms that inevitably flew our way. But once people got to know us as individual people, as sisters, nieces, cousins etc they knew that we were absolutely no different from them in the fundamentally human ways that matter. If our Public Diplomacy had more of this human approach maybe there wouldn’t be so much mistrust. In fact, if the U.S. wanted, I would personally travel all around the world and be a U.S. fun ambassador and show the rest of the world how kick ass an American can be (on the their dime of course).