=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.