Abstract
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the U.S. government launched a series of multimillion-dollar programs designed under a wide-scale public diplomacy plan to improve America’s image in the Middle East and win the hearts and minds of the Arab people. Two such programs, Radio Sawa and Al Hurra satellite television, were supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal body responsible for all U.S. international broadcasting. The target audience for Radio Sawa and Television Al Hurra is the younger Arab generation, who will be tomorrow’s decision-makers.
The researcher would like to express his gratitude for Dr. Leonard Teel, the Director of the Center for International Media Education at Georgia State University’s Department of Communication, for establishing most of the connections that helped with distributing the questionnaires for this study to college students in the Middle East; and to Qing Tian, a doctoral student at Georgia State University’s Department of Communication, for helping with the data entry and statistical analysis for this study. A version of this study was published in Global Media and Communication, vol. 2, no. 2 (2006): 185–205.
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Notes
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el-Nawawy, M. (2007). U.S. Public Diplomacy and the News Credibility of Radio Sawa and Television Al Hurra in the Arab World. In: Seib, P. (eds) New Media and the New Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605602_7
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