trailing far behind Western stations. Of regular listeners to foreign radio in Hungary in 1967, Gallup has reported 64 percent listened to Radio Free Europe, 31 percent to the BBC, 30 percent to VOA, and 16 percent to Radio Moscow. In Poland in 1969, it was 36 percent for VOA, 32 percent for RFE, 31 percent for BBC, and just 1 percent for Radio Moscow. Among college graduates surveyed in East Africa in 1968, the Voice of Kenya had 70 percent, BBC 61 percent, Radio Uganda 45 percent, VOA 36 percent, Radio Tanzania 33 percent, Radio Brazzaville 19 percent, Voice of the Gospel 17 percent, Radio Moscow 7 percent, Deutsche Welle 7 percent, and Radio Peking 2 percent. A general population survey carried out by the German government in Argentina in 1968 shows the BBC on top among foreign broadcasters with 3.4 percent, VOA 3 percent, Moscow 1.1 percent, Deutsche Welle 1 percent, Spain 1 percent, France .6 percent and Havana, Peking, and CBC all .5 percent. Only in India does Moscow do relatively well. According to a 1969 survey of regular listeners to foreign broadcasts, Radio Ceylon had 83 percent, BBC 66 percent, VOA 58 percent, and Radio Moscow 55 percent. Within government bureaucracies, the debate will doubtless continue as to what audiences their radio operations should try to reach. Some will advance the "elite" theory-called the "target group concept" within the U.S. Information Agency, and described informally by BBC programmers as "the pernicious doctrine of the influential few." Most professionals in the business of international radio will agree that they want most of all to reach the "opinion leaders." But they understand this term in the sense used by sociologists, beginning with Paul Lazarsfeld in the 1940's: that is, not as limited to representatives of the elite and of the media, but as made up of individuals in all walks of life who influence their peers. It is further argued that persons sufficiently motivated to listen to foreign broadcasts are likely to belong to such groups, which include potential leaders not otherwise identifiable. It is this large body of people-estimated at from 10 to 20 percent of the adult population of most countries that forms "public opinion," a force that has been growing at a quickening pace over the past two centuries. Diplomats, writes Lloyd Free, do not include in their calculations the degree to which the public all over the world has, in fact, got into the act; nor the extent to which propaganda, popular persuasion, and information and cultural programs have become major instruments of the new diplomacy. 15 HOW INFLUENTIAL IS INTERNATIONAL RADIO? We have seen that a tremendous effort is going into international broadcasting, and that the audiences are large. But what effect does all this have? Obviously, there is no pat answer. Don Smith notwithstanding (see footnote 11), it is hard to believe that short-wave broadcasts have had any appreciable effect on the thinking of Americans. But in much of the rest of the world, international broadcasts may be as influential as local radio, occasionally even more so. In Africa, radio has been "an essential instrument of national development,"16 and BBC, VOA, and ORTF have all seen it to be in their interest to help propagate this development. Radio is also seen as the "most powerful" and "crucial" weapon in the "war for men's minds" on the dark continent. 17 In Nigeria, Brazil, and India, for example, Everett Rogers found the broadcast media particularly important in the diffusion of innovations. Of the world's largest country, Ithiel de Sola Pool has said: Most of the things of a positive character that are happening in the Soviet Union today are explainable only in terms of the influence of the West, for which the most important single channel is radio. There is now enough communication to keep us part of a single civilization, to keep us influencing each other, to assure that any Western idea circulates in the Soviet Union, too. The pessimistic expectation that totalitarianism could develop an accepted heinous civilization of its own by 1984 or any other year has been defeated primarily by the forces of communication, and above all by international radio. 18 CONCLUSION The public for international radio will continue to be a broad one, including a wide spectrum of the intellectually curious. Its influence will vary, depending upon signal penetration, competition of local media, area listening habits, the presence or absence of crisis situations, and other factors. Morning listening will become relatively more important where televiewing has become widespread. The purpose of international broadcasts may shift slightly in the direction of plugging the industries or products of the sponsor country, as has happened in recent years with the BBC and the Deutsche Welle. . . . [The] Director General of the BBC, describes the role of the External Services as "the cultivation of trade and good will."19 Yet the prime aims will undoubtedly remain political; to win friends, explain policies, break down the other fellow's monopoly on information, and, particularly for "clandestine" operations, support rebel movements and subvert the governments of target countries. The race to build bigger transmitters and mount more programing becomes increasingly expensive. Yet in the last analysis, the major international broadcasters cannot afford to fall behind. They fear to leave the field open to others, whose interests are less than identical at best and sharply inimical at worst. For the future of international radio it is safe to predict: more of the same. NOTES For Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Figures compiled by FBIS and VOA. 2 VOA is jammed in Havana, but rather ineffectually. Suspicious interference with Western broadcasts has also been reported in Cairo and Alexandria. The USSR jams Peking's broadcasts in Russian, but China leaves Moscow's Mandarin programs unmolested. China also leaves BBC alone, concentrating on the VOA and the Republic of China's 274 hours a week out of Taiwan in eight different Chinese dialects. In 1963, Khrushchev lifted Soviet jamming of VOA and BBC—not Radio Liberty-but it was resumed within hours of the invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. Jamming of Western broadcasts in Czech and Slovak was also resumed at that time. 3. Alexander Szalai, "Multinational Comparative Social Research," American Behavioral Scientist, 10 (December, 1966). Two volumes of the results of this study are due for publication later in 1971. 4. Some U.S. surveys have put the time spent in televiewing as high as three hours daily or even more, but Dr. Robinson has told me that he considers these figures inflated. Various studies by the R-TV Culture Research Institute of NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting system, put the Japanese average at about three hours daily. 5. Edgar T. Martin and George Jacobs, "Shortwave Broadcasting in the 1970's," in J.M. Frost, ed., How to Listen to the World (Pontllanfraith, Wales; Pendragon Press, 1971), pp. 4-8. 6. The European Broadcasting Union Review of July, 1970 reports "a general stabilization of the over-all audience with a slight increase in certain countries" and "an upward trend in the early morning." 7. According to Radio Liberty, the number of sets in the Soviet Union, exclusive of wired speakers, stood at just 50 million in 1970, or about one to every five persons. Twenty-eight million sets tune to short wave. However, there was a great concentration of sets in European Russia. 8. Alan P. Liu, "Mass Communication and Media in China's Cultural Revolution," Journalism Quarterly, 46 (Summer, 1969), p. 314. 9. Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt's Liberation: The Philosophy of a Revolution (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1955). 10. Wilbur Schramm, "World Distribution of the Mass Media," in Heinz-Dietrich Fischer and John C. Merrill, eds., International Communication (New York: Hastings House, 1970), p. 157. 11. See Don D. Smith, "America's Short-Wave Audience: Twenty-Five Years Later," Public Opinion Quarterly, 33 (Winter, 1969/70), pp. 537-545; and "Some Effects of Radio Moscow's North American Broadcasts," Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Winter, 1970/71), pp. 539–551. 12. Over one-half of the blocks of vernacular language broadcasts carried by the BBC External Services are no more than fifteen minutes long. 13. BBC Handbook (London: Cox & Wyman, 1970), p. 16. 14. An article in the May 27 issue of the Turkish newspaper Son Havadis charged that “there were identical passages in broadcasts of the Communist 'Our Radio' transmission from East German and Hungary, and articles by certain writers in Turkey." 15. Lloyd A. Free, "Public Opinion Research," in Arthur S. Hoffman, ed., International Communication and the New Diplomacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 52. 16. Rosalynde Ainslie, The Press in Africa (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), pp. 153–176. 17. Ibid., p. 166. 18. Address in Workshop in Communications with the People of the USSR, sponsored by the Radio Liberty Committee and the Department of Communications in Education, New York University School of Education, November 19, 1965. Professor de Sola Pool reports that information amassed over the past six years has further confirmed this statement. 19. BBC Handbook, 1970, p. 16. PROPAGANDA THROUGH THE PRINTED MEDIA BY Y. V. LAKSHMANA RAO Developing countries fear the introduction of alien and undesirable influences in the form of printed media from the outside world. Unlike the developed countries, developing societies are almost exclusively consumers of international communications, not producers; audience, not communicator. The "flow of communications" is essentially unidirectional in such cases. THE PRINT MEDIA Insofar as the printed media in the developing countries are concerned, there are certain specific factors which one can discuss as leading to an international intercourse which is neither planned nor propagated deliberately. It is difficult, in the absence of any systematic study, to point out how much of this international intercourse is "propaganda" and how much is non-persuasive content affecting thought and behavior. To the extent that in many of these countries a relatively free press does exist and that outright censorship does not exist, there is scope for a considerable amount of international flow of information. But there are other factors within the structure of the printed media themselves which lead to a situation where a great deal of non-indigenous material comes in. These factors are worthy of consideration. The post-colonial era left a number of newspapers in the hands of foreign investors and of expatriate editors and editorial staff who gained their experience during the colonial period. We are not now dealing with those newspapers which printed surreptitiously and perhaps provoked people into rebellion or some other manifestation of an anti-colonial nature leading thereby to independence. We are talking only about those newspapers which were economically viable and which have continued to publish after the countries gained independence. The editorial staffs of these papers have continued, generally speaking, as the "Westerners" did. They have continued to belong to an elite group which is invariably far removed from the mass of the people; they have continued, by and large, to talk a certain "language"-which is usually the language of The Times of London or the Daily News or the Daily Express. These have been the newspapers which the average journalist in the developing countries still tries to emulate, whether or not he has the benefit of the audience of, say, The New York Times. This has led to a certain professional conformity which is international. It has also limited their appeal, viewed in the context of communities where broad-based governments *Excerpts from "Propaganda Through the Printed Media in the Developing Countries," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 398 (November 1971), pp. 93–103. Reprinted with the permission of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the courtesy of the author. and political structures are now generally the rule. This has left the newspapers catering only to a small minority, however important that minority may be in the decision-making process. Another factor leading to such conformity is both economic and professional in nature: the presence of the big international news agencies, and in many ways their stranglehold on the newspapers of the developing countries. It is professional because of the quality and the convenience which these agencies provide; it is economic because most of the newspapers cannot afford to have correspondents in the major news centers of the world. An additional reason is that many of the developing countries cannot afford to have national news agencies of any reasonable size; and even where these exist, such agencies in turn have to subscribe to one or more of the international agencies for their inflow of world news. The pressure toward "objectivity" and accuracy to satisfy a mixed clientele including governments, commerce, and industry, as well as news media of varying political beliefs-has already led to conformity among the newspapers in the industrially advanced countries, where it is increasingly common to have only one newspaper in each town. Although not quite to the same extent, a similar situation seems to be developing in other parts of the world. In the absence of human and material resources to support competing newspapers, news agencies, or feature services, the content of newspapers is becoming increasingly standarized. SPECIALIZED AUDIENCES In the case of magazines, however, the situation is perhaps slightly better, but only slightly. While these publishers do aim at more specialized audiences-youth, women, the educated elite, the business community, and so on-even they are finding it more convenient and cheaper either to subscribe to syndicated material from abroad or to buy regional rights to publication of new books in serialized form. Even where book publishing is concerned, it is becoming increasingly common for publishing firms to establish similar relationships with publishers abroad. One need only to go into a book shop or a stationery shop in a developing country to find this uniformity of taste (innate or developed) extending to such things as posters and phonograph records. Among the widely circulated magazines, Time, Newsweek, Life and the Reader's Digest come immediately to mind as those which have special editions for specific regions, with local advertising and well-organized distribution systems. Newspapers like the international edition of the Herald Tribune, the Sunday New York Times, or the weekly English edition of Le Monde, reach the far corners of the earth within a day or two of publication. And books, whether they be The Death of a President, The Ugly American, or Candy, are to be found on the bookshelves of the rest of the world at almost the same time as they reach the homes of Ameri cans. |