From the White House:
Judith A. McHale, Nominee for Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Department of State
Ms. McHale is a leading media and communications executive whose career has been devoted to building companies and non-profit organizations dedicated to reaching out to and connecting people around the world. She is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of Discovery Communications. From 1987 to 2006, McHale helped build the parent company of the Discovery Channel into one of the world’s most extensive media enterprises, with more than 100 channels telecast in over 170 countries and 35 languages to more than 1 billion subscribers. In the 1990s, McHale launched the non-profit Discovery Channel Global Education Partnership, which supplies free educational video programming to more than half a million students across Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. After two decades at Discovery, McHale extended her commitment to helping build opportunity for people in Africa. With the Global Environment Fund, a private equity firm, she worked to launch the GEF/Africa Growth Fund, an investment vehicle intending to focus on supplying expansion capital to small and medium-sized businesses that provide consumer goods and services in emerging African markets. McHale’s commitment to global outreach efforts also includes her service on the boards of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the National Democratic Institute, and Vital Voices. She previously served on the board of Africare. The daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, McHale was born in New York City and grew up in Britain and apartheid-era South Africa. Before joining Discovery, McHale served as General Counsel for MTV Networks and helped guide the company’s international expansion.
See also:
So Marc Lynch didn’t get the job he was campaigning for!!!
Well, that took for-frickin-ever. That delay was decidedly NOT AWESOME. In fact, it was quite LAME.Now, the next question is, will McHale commit multiple acts of AWESOME or join the plentiful stable of LAMENESS as many of her predecessors?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/politics/16policy.html?_r=1&ref=worldPentagon Closes Office Accused of Issuing Propaganda Under Bush
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon office responsible for coordinating Defense Department information campaigns overseas has been abolished in an effort by the Obama administration to distance itself from past practices that some military officers called propaganda, senior officials said Wednesday.
Military and civilian critics said the office, the Defense Department office for support to public diplomacy, overstepped its mandate during the final years of the Bush administration by trying to organize information operations that violated Pentagon guidelines for accuracy and transparency. …
Anon, this story is more about internal strife, turf battles, and competing views of influence and engagement than about accuracy and transparency. It is really off base and ignores others who lament the demise of the office. Some believe you can inform without influence and that anything more than tossing a press release over the wall is manipulation. I will go out on a limb and question if some of these same folks who fought (and subsequently won) the turf war against SPD would argue the Smith-Mundt Act applies 100% to the Defense Department while ignoring the real impact of this erroneous extension is an elimination of transparency that prevents accountability. More to come on this.