In a sense, however, salesmanship does serve the military purpose of accustoming the audience to appeals both visual and auditory. The consequence is that competing, outside propaganda can reach the domestic American audience only in competition with the local advertising. It is difficult for foreign competition to hold attention amid an almost limitless number of professionally competent commercial appeals. A Communist or Fascist party cannot get public attention in the United States by the simple expedient of a "mass meeting" of three hundred persons, or by the use of a few dozen posters in a metropolitan area. Before the political propagandist can get the public attention, he must edge his media past the soap operas, the soft drink advertisements, the bathing beauties advertising Pennsylvania crude or bright-leaf tobacco. The consequence is that outside propaganda either fails to get much public attention, or else camouflages itself to resemble and to exploit existing media. Clamorous salesmanship deadens the American citizen to his own government's propaganda, and may to a certain extent lower his civic alertness; but at the same time, salesmanship has built up a psychological Great Wall which excludes foreign or queer appeals and which renders the United States almost impervious to sudden ideological penetration from overseas. =Psychological Warfare and Public Relations.= Psychological warfare and public relations are different in the direction in which they apply. Psychological warfare is designed to reach the enemy. Public relations is designed primarily to reach the home audience. Both reach neutrals, sometimes confusingly much. In some nations, the two functions were combined in a single instrumentality, as in the Japanese _Joho Kyoku_ (see page 184, below). The American army and navy traditions of public relations are based on the ideas that the news should be as complete as military security may permit, that it should be delivered speedily and interestingly, that it should enhance the confidence of the people in their armed services, and that its tenor (no less than its contents) should not aid the enemy morale. These ideas are justified in terms of sound newspaper practice, but they can lead to a weak psychological warfare position when we must deal with an inventive and enterprising enemy.