The most likely situation for the isolated consul, businessman, officer, missionary, or amateur is one in which he can get a certain amount of stenographic help in taking down the broadcast material. The radio for monitoring varies in accordance with general reception conditions. Practically all the U. S. Army Signal Corps receivers will perform satisfactorily for local monitoring; so too will ordinary private sets, including the larger portables. An automobile radio can often be driven away from interference and from a hilltop or the edge of a lake can pick up a standard-wave station that cannot be distinguished on a much larger house set in the city. For transoceanic or world-wide reception, a short-wave receiver is of course necessary. It is unwise to pick a sample that involves too much rapid speech, such as a foreign soap opera. The best reception is almost always the Morse code transmission of news or the slow dictation-speed reading of news from one central station to outlying news offices or substations. Selection of a program which usually comes in, arrangement for a verbatim copy of the program, daily checking of the news under standard analysis procedures--this gives a very fair cross-section. One man sitting at Hankow could find out just what both the Generalissimo and the Chinese Communists were trying to tell the French-understanding and the Dutch-understanding listeners in the Far East. Another with pipe and slippers in Brussels could keep tab on the basic Russian lines to the Spanish-speaking world. Such monitoring obviously comes in handy for newspapers, commercial firms, governments, military establishments, speculators, and research institutions. =Identification: Propaganda vs. Truth.= The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays--all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!" The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports." Propaganda was defined (at the beginning of this book) as follows: _Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose._ Taking a lesson from Communist theory, we can say that any form of mass-communication is operated for propaganda purposes _if no other motive for running it is evident_. Human beings talk; they like to talk. Much private talk is idle--but only an imbecile would talk over a radio network just for the pleasure of hearing himself talking. Propaganda is presentation for a purpose; it is the _purpose_ that makes it propaganda, and not the truthfulness or untruthfulness of it.