Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
=Other U.S. Facilities.= A complicated element in the State Department's
conduct of propaganda was the fact that at no time did the State
Department enjoy even a monopoly of the _governmental_ mass
communications of the United States abroad. (It goes without saying that
at no time did the State Department achieve or seek control of private
U.S. mass communications such as the international editions of _Time_
and _Newsweek_, the circulation of American books and magazines on a
commercial basis, commercial American-owned publications abroad, or the
like.) At the very least level of competition the State Department had
the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) broadcasting to most of the
countries in which the State Department was active--often broadcasting
in quite a different tone of voice and with very different content. In
many instances, foreigners who understood English preferred to listen to
the lively radio programs transmitted for the edification of U.S.
service personnel stationed abroad, rather than to listen to "canned"
programs made up for the benefit of themselves as a foreign target. (The
author has seen Chinese shopkeepers in Singapore listen very seriously
to a sergeant giving the news of the day at dictation speed from an
armed services transmitter somewhere in the Pacific Ocean area.) In 1948
there was virtually no coordination between the armed services and the
Department of State. As time went on, the two sets of U.S. broadcasts
took a certain amount of note of each other. Coordination was not as
easy as it might seem on paper.
After all, what is one to do? Is it valid to "propagandize" our
innocently cherubic service personnel abroad whom so many domestic
purity leagues and local pressure groups are anxious to defend? After
all, these service people possess fearful weapons. Each has a
Congressman to whom he might write. But if service personnel in a
foreign country are to be given nonpropaganda materials, how can the
same area be given propaganda materials for the benefit of the
indigenous personnel? The propaganda from the United States Government
must not be too much at variance with the "nonpropaganda" of the United
States Government. If the two extremes of communication were too far
apart, the United States Government might look like an ass. That would
be most unhappy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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