Radio propaganda analysis follows the same considerations as those which govern choice of materials for analyzing printed matter. It is a surer method to follow one or two programs on a station than to make wide random selections. A standard-wave transmitter to the home audience comes closer to revealing the domestic scene than would a global rebroadcast of ostensibly identical material. Radio has a further advantage over print. Few nations print out separate propaganda for each foreign-language area, while almost every large and medium-sized country has international facilities for broadcast. Since the programs are beamed to different language groups, the senders automatically make up propaganda lines for each audience.[31]
Attentive monitoring can provide material for distinguishing the various lines which any given nation is sending out to its friends, neighbors, or rivals. Frequently the differences between these lines make good counterpropaganda. If you hear the Germans telling the Danes that all Nordics are supermen and all non-Nordics scum, while telling the Japanese that the National Socialist idea of the world transcends pluto-democratic race prejudice, put the two quotations together and send them back to the Danes and the Japanese both.
Radio, unlike print, cannot be held for the analyst's convenience. It is physically unhandy to try to file actual recordings of enemy broadcasts for preservation and reference. When the analysis center is large, as it would be if near the headquarters of a government or a theater of war, the difficulties of monitoring involve problems of stenographic and language help. The monitors themselves can then be stenographers, taking verbatim dictation. They write down the enemy broadcast word-for-word, either right off the air or from records. The editor then selects the most important parts of the day's intake for mimeographic or other circulation. Important material can be put in a daily radio summary of enemy propaganda for the area monitored. The rest of it can be sent along by mail, put in files and classified (lest the enemy government find out what its own propagandists really were saying), preserved on the recording, or destroyed.
During World War II these basic verbatim reports played a very important part. The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service did the job for the United States, operating through the war years under the Federal Communications Commission. It has since been shifted from FCC to the War Department, and from the War Department to the Central Intelligence Group. Its materials sometimes are unclassified, although during most of the war they were marked restricted, and they are not available to the public except through microfilm copies of the Library of Congress file. These FBIS daily reports skimmed the cream off the enemy news broadcasts, and included editorial or feature material which might have intelligence or policy interest.
Monitoring by a Single Individual.
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 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."