Using data from a content analysis of partisan media and a public opinion survey administered in Hong Kong, this study incorporates selective exposure and deliberation literature into the network agenda-setting (NAS) model to test media effects on people’s perception of the relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. This study advances the NAS literature by examining the effects of different media types (i.e., pro- and counter-attitudinal media), considering the patterns of media consumption (i.e., engagement in selective exposure or not), and differentiating between the NAS effects on one’s own opinion repertoire and the oppositional opinion repertoire (i.e., thoughts about how oppositional others perceive the issue). The findings of the study demonstrate that the network agenda of pro-attitudinal media was significantly correlated with both one’s own and oppositional opinion repertoires for those who engaged in partisan selective exposure. For those who did not engage in partisan selective exposure, the network agenda of counter-attitudinal media was significantly related to the oppositional opinion repertoire and the findings for one’s own opinion repertoire were mixed.

Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discussions with its followers. We argue that a cultural studies perspective can shed important light on the political significance of RT's social media re-enactment in ways that current studies of public diplomacy as a soft power resource often fail to do. It can advance soft power theory by offering a more nuanced, dynamic analysis of how state media mobilise, and how audiences engage with, social media re-enactments as commemorative events. We find that rather than promoting a unitary propagandistic narrative about Russia, 1917LIVE served instead to soften attitudes towards RT itself - encouraging audiences to view RT as an educator and entertainer as well as a news broadcaster - normalising its presence as a Russian public diplomacy resource in the international news media landscape. Our analysis of audience interactions with and interpretations of 1917LIVE affords insights into how the 1917 re-enactment worked as didactic entertainment eliciting affective identification with the characters of the revolution. Such public diplomacy projects contribute in the short term to a strengthening of the engagement required to create longer-term soft power effects.

Public diplomacy is a term much used but seldom subjected to rigorous analysis. This article—which draws heavily on a report commissioned by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the spring of 2007—sets out a simple taxonomy of public diplomacy's components and their interrelationships. These components are (1) listening, (2) advocacy, (3) cultural diplomacy, (4) exchange, and (5) international broadcasting. It examines five successful and five unsuccessful uses of each individual component drawing from the history of U.S., Franco-German, Swiss, and British diplomatic practice. The failures arise chiefly from a discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. The final section applies the author's taxonomy to the challenges of contemporary public diplomacy and places special emphasis on the need to conceptualize the task of the public diplomat as that of the creator and disseminator of “memes” (ideas capable of being spread from one person to another across a social network) and as a creator and facilitator of networks and relationships.

This work presents and critically evaluates attempts to theorize and conceptualize public diplomacy within several disciplines, including international relations, strategic studies, diplomatic studies, public relations, and communication. It also examines research methods used to investigate public diplomacy, including models, paradigms, case studies, and comparative analysis. The work identifies promising directions as well as weaknesses and gaps in existing knowledge and methodology and outlines a new research agenda. The presented analysis and examples suggest that only a systematic multidisciplinary effort and close collaboration between researchers and practitioners can lead to a coherent theory of public diplomacy.

Mediated public diplomacy literature examines the engagement of foreign audiences by governments via mediated channels. To date, scholars have examined the competitive contest between global rivals in promoting and contesting one another's frames as reflected in global news media coverage. Recognizing the meaningful impact of social media platforms, along with the global rise of government-sponsored media organizations, the current study builds on previous mediated public diplomacy scholarship by expanding the scope of the literature beyond the earned media perspective to also include paid, shared, and owned media. The article presents a revised definition of the term mediated public diplomacy along with a case study of government to foreign stakeholder engagement via the social media platform, Twitter.

Public diplomacy is a political instrument with analytical boundaries and distinguishing characteristics, but is it an academic field? It is used by states, associations of states, and nonstate actors to understand cultures, attitudes, and behavior; build and manage relationships; and influence opinions and actions to advance interests and values. This article examines scholarship with relevance, usually unintended, to the study of public diplomacy and a body of analytical and policy-related literature derived from the practice of public diplomacy. Ideas, wars, globalism, technologies, political pressures, and professional norms shaped the conduct of public diplomacy and the literature of scholars and practitioners during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, thick globalism, network structures, and new technologies are transforming scholarship, governance, and state-based public diplomacy. An achievable consensus on an analytical framework and a substantial scholarly and practical literature hold promise for an emerging academic field.

Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a “news story” approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a “traditional” analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. “Slow” newspapers, for example, often precede other media’s coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.

In this volatile and increasingly fast-revolving world, it has become crucially important to monitor, measure and manage nation image and its dynamic changes in real time. However, few studies have been conducted on a model to measure the image and/or its changes. The purpose of this paper is to find an economically affordable methodology to measure nation image and its changes online in real time.

This study aims to advance the theoretical and practical knowledge of political public relations, and influence that political profile of the media can have on the agenda-building process. The influences of agenda indexing are also discussed with regard to different media profiles. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to examine the influence of Polish and Russian government messages from presidents and prime ministers regarding the Smolensk plane crash on media coverage in both counties. Newspapers were categorized by political profile representing pro-government, mainstream, or opposition profile. Nearly all of the hypotheses were fully supported for the first, second, and third level of agenda building. Results of this study demonstrate that political public relations’ success and agenda indexing can be affected by a medium’s political profile, particularly in the case of opposition media. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with areas of future research.

The evolution and adaptation of journalistic practice in response to discourses taking place in networked and shared media environments and the implications of same have been the focus of much academic attention in recent years. This paper examines the agenda-setting potential of Twitter and considers how this feeds into and affects journalistic output. It does so by applying a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework in considering whether reportage on particular news events are re-framed in the aftermath of Twitter campaigns. In August 2016, the Irish media's framing of the Hawe murder suicide via sourcing, emphasis and agency drew widespread criticism on social media for its perceived 'omission' or 'significant silence' about one of the victims, Clodagh Hawe, from the narrative in favour of a greater focus on the perpetrator, Alan Hawe. Criticism of the initial coverage of the incident was in large part driven by the #hernamewasclodagh social media campaign. This paper takes an intertextual approach to the analysis of correlations between emphases within the social media campaign and differences in the framing of the news media coverage before and after that campaign.

– This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.