War and Piece: State, unplugged. Op-ed from a former official

[maddezmom]

State, unplugged. Until a few weeks ago, Price Floyd was director of media affairs at the State Department, a department in which he'd served for seventeen years. Check out his oped upon leaving the public diplomacy job in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:

To turn a famous Hollywood movie quote on its head: What we don't have here is a failure to communicate.

Since 9-11, the State Department has undertaken an unprecedented effort to reach audiences both in the U.S. and overseas to explain our foreign policy objectives. My former office there arranged more than 6,500 interviews in the past six years, about half of those with international media. On any given day, senior department officials, including the secretary of state, were doing four or five interviews.

Yet during this time, poll after poll showed an alarming trajectory of increased animosity toward America and this administration in particular, both here and abroad.

more:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/006179.html

[bluerum]

1. Link to original article. "Reconnecting with the world", By Price Floyd

Reconnecting with the world

Reconnecting with the world
By PRICE FLOYD
Special to the Star-Telegram

To turn a famous Hollywood movie quote on its head: What we don't have here is a failure to communicate.

Since 9-11, the State Department has undertaken an unprecedented effort to reach audiences both in the U.S. and overseas to explain our foreign policy objectives. My former office there arranged more than 6,500 interviews in the past six years, about half of those with international media. On any given day, senior department officials, including the secretary of state, were doing four or five interviews.

Yet during this time, poll after poll showed an alarming trajectory of increased animosity toward America and this administration in particular, both here and abroad.

This contradiction -- reaching a larger audience than ever before to explain our foreign policy goals and objectives, while the support for those policies fell -- underscores the gap between how our actions have been perceived and how we want them to be perceived.

Reconnecting with the world