The Bureau of Public Affairs is the part of the United States Department of State that carries out the Secretary of State's mandate to help Americans understand the importance of foreign affairs. The Bureau is led by an Assistant Secretary who also serves as Department spokesman. The United States Department of State, often referred to as the State Department, is the Cabinet-level foreign affairs agency of the United States Government, equivalent to foreign ministries in other countries. ... This article is about a journal. ...
The PA Bureau pursues the State Department's mission to inform the American people and to feed their concerns and comments back to the policymakers. It accomplishes this in a variety of ways, which include:
Strategic and tactical planning to advance the Administration's priority foreign policy goals;
Conducting press briefings for domestic and foreign press corps;
Pursuing media outreach, enabling Americans everywhere to hear directly from key Department officials through local, regional and national media interviews;
Answering questions from the public about current foreign policy issues by phone, email, or letter;
Arranging town meetings and scheduling speakers to visit communities to discuss U.S. foreign policy and why it is important to all Americans;
Producing and coordinating audio-visual products and services in the U.S. and abroad for the public, the press, the Secretary of State, and Department bureaus and offices;
Preparing historical studies on U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs matters.
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A foreign policy is a set of political goals that seeks to outline how a particular country will interact with the other countries of the world. ...
However, public diplomacy was shorn of its overseas operationsput under the control of the regional bureaus; its media reaction and public opinion research staffs were stripped awayplaced within States Intelligence and Research bureau and its Foreign Press Centers were transferred to the domestic-oriented Bureau of PublicAffairs (PA).
Overseas, publicaffairs officers are faced with mounting pressures from Embassy front offices to devote their energies to publicaffairs at the expense of public diplomacy.
Public diplomacy officers must be among those who would be doing the calling in. In other words, senior leadership of the real power centers of the Department of State, the regional bureaus, must include senior public diplomacy officers at least at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level.