"There is near universal agreement that public diplomacy is broken and something must be done and done quickly to fix it," states a new report from the Public Diplomacy Council. The Council suggests establishing a U.S. Agency for Public Diplomacy within the State Department, quadrupling the federal public diplomacy budget to $4 billion, and increasing overseas staff three-fold. Their report also "ridicules recent initiatives such as the creation of Radio Sawa to beam American pop songs to the Middle East." While young people are "the future decision makers," the report calls for "substantive news and feature programming," to Middle Eastern youth, elites and current decision-makers.

At a recent conference, the publisher of South Korea's OhmyNews described "the collaboration between Korean citizens and the online newspaper. ... Eight hours before the start of voting, another candidate who had been supporting [reform candidate Roh Moo Myun], withdrew from the campaign. The conservative newspaper ... was quick to call Korean voters to follow this example and withdraw their support for Roh." However, "the online community of Korean netizens who were backing Roh sprang into action." OhmyNews covered their actions, becoming "the epicenter of reform-minded citizens." Instead of such dynamic coverage, U.S. media "was filled with negative campaign ads" in the months before the U.S. elections.

The Bush administration "spent $250 million on public relations contracts during its first term, compared with $128 million spent for President Clinton between 1997 and 2000," including $88 million in fiscal year 2004, according to a report by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee. "While not all public relations spending is illegal or inappropriate, this rapid rise in public relations contracts at a time of growing budget deficits raises questions," stated the report. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services spent the most on PR over the past four years, $94 million, and the largest recipient of government PR contracts was Ketchum, at $97 million.

In October 2004, "a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded" in March 2003. "Public-health professionals have uniformly praised the paper for its correct methods and notable results," but "many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines." The timing of the paper's publication, days before the U.S. election, "opened the study to charges of political propaganda." The study's lead author "blames the American news media for being embedded not only with the military but also with the military point of view," but also faults himself for not managing the media better.