The collected news of any modern country contains more truth each day than any one man can could read in a lifetime. The reporters, editors, writers, announcers who collect truth not only collect it; they select it. They have to. Why do they select it? That is the propaganda question. If they select it to "affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose," it is propaganda. If they report that a little girl fell out of bed and broke her neck--with the intent of frightening parents among their listeners into following the Safe Homes Week Campaign--that is propaganda. But if they report it because it is the only death in the community, and because they might as well fill up the program, it is not propaganda. If you put the statement on the air, "An American negro workman in Greensboro, N. C., got eighty cents for a hard day's work last week," that can be presented and interpreted as: (a.) simple news, if there is something more to the story, about what the man said, or how he spent the eighty cents on corn meal to feed his pet tarantula; (b.) anti-capitalist propaganda, if you show that eighty cents is mighty little money for American business to pay its workers; (c.) pro-capitalist propaganda, if you show that the eighty cents will buy more than two weeks' wages of a worker in the city of Riga, when it comes to consumer goods; (d.) anti-White propaganda, if you show the man got only eighty cents because he was a Negro. And so on, through a further variety of interpretations. The facts--man, happening, amount, place, time--are _true_ in each case. They could be sworn to by the whole membership of an interfaith conference. But the interpretation placed on them--who communicates these facts to whom? why? when?--makes them into propaganda. And interpretation can no more be true or untrue than a Ford car can be vanilla or strawberry in flavor. The questions of truth and of interpretation are unrelated categories. The essence of motive is that it is ultimately private and impenetrable, and interpretation commonly involves imputation of motive. You can dislike an interpretation; you can kill a man for believing it; you can propagandize him out of believing it; but you cannot sit down and _prove_ that it is untrue. Facts and logic are useful in propaganda, but they cannot be elevated to the point where you can say, "Is it propaganda or is it true?" Almost all good propaganda--no matter what kind--is true. It uses truth selectively.