Media diplomacy: Conceptual divergence and applications

This article contends that the use of media diplomacy as a theoretical concept has been highly confusing and misleading. It substantially revises and restricts the concept to one particular and distinctive relationship between the media and diplomacy. The article expands and adds two more conceptual models, public diplomacy and media-broker diplomacy, to investigate the other relationships. Each model exists only when certain characteristics or conditions are present, and each has different professional and ethical ramifications for the three main factors involved in diplomacy: the government, the media, and public opinion. The article demonstrates the analytical usefulness of the models through applications to various examples and case studies of significant contemporary diplomatic processes.