1 April 10. 1947.

2 The materials were collected and analyzed for the Division of Radio Program Evaluation, part of the International Broadcasting Service of the Department of State. Particular acknowledgment must be made for the encouragement and the many valuable suggestions offered by Leo Lowenthal, Chief of the Division, and to Marjorie F. Lissance, Chief of the Division's Analysis Branch. Mark G. Field, Lawrence Silverman, and Ruth Widmayer assisted in the collection and analysis of the materials and made many valuable contributions to the total research program.

The Russian Research Center, Harvard University, of which the author is Senior Research Fellow, supported the study in numerous ways, for which grateful acknowledgment is hereby made.

3 For discussion of other aspects of the original study see Alex Inkeles, “The Soviet Characterization of the Voice of America,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs, Vol. V, No. 2 (Spring, 1951) and “Soviet Reactions to the Voice of America,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XVI, No. 4 (Spring, 1952–53), 612–17.Google Scholar Also see M. G. Field, “Does the ‘Voice of America’ Reach the Russian People?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 5, 1950.

4 The newspapers included two general mass circulation papers—Pravda and Izvestija; two more specialized mass circulation publications, Komsomolskaja Pravda and Trud, the central organ of the trade unions; four diversified newspapers for the Soviet elite—Literaturnaja Qazeta, Učitel'skaja Qazeta, Kul'tura i Zizn', and the Russian edition of the Cominform Za Pročnyj Mir; and one specialized newspaper for a technical occupational group, the railwayman's Gudok.

5 These included the popular mass circulation journals Krokodil and Ogonek; the more specialized but “popular” Rabotnica and Krest'janka; the political journals Bolševik, Novoe Vremja, and Slavjane; and the “fat” literary journals Oktjabr’ and Novyj Mir.

6 A total of 7,111 issues were scanned, of which 6,274 were newspapers and 837 journals. These totals represent what is very nearly a complete survey of all issues of these publications appearing during the period of the survey.

7 It appears that particularly during the last two years of the period covered by this survey efforts were made to include in the monitoring reports all monitored references to the Voice of America.

8 There were some scattered references to the “voice of America” which clearly were using the words in a more general sense. These were excluded from consideration in this study, with the exception of those referring to the play The Voice of America. At the same time there were some references to the “American radio” or the “State Department radio” which in the context clearly meant the VOA, and these were included as references in our sample. Their number was, however, very small.

9 As indicated in Table 1, there were 549 “standard base” references. There were, in addition, 270 references which were radio repetitions and thirty-eight which were press repetitions. These, plus seventy-six play advertisements, yield our grand total of 933 references.

10 It may occur to some that the rise in the number of references during the year 1950-1951 might be only spurious evidence of increasing attention because of the previously mentioned efforts to include all monitored references to the VOA in the monitoring reports. Even if this played a role, it could not have been solely responsible for the rise because of the fact that newspaper and journal sources, not subject to this sampling bias, yielded a much larger number of references for the last two years of the survey than they did for the first two years.

11 It should not be assumed that the specific activities of the VOA have not been able to produce important direct reactions from Soviet sources. For example, a VOA broadcast in late May, 1950, reporting the poor living conditions of miners in the Donbas region produced a belated (August 17), but strong Soviet rebuttal repeated fifteen times to a variety of foreign audiences. Similar, if less intense, reactions were evoked by the VOA's comments on the post-war monetary reform and the Soviet afforestation program.

12 The full Russian text was printed in Izvestija, August 5, 1950.

13 Although a sample containing only broadcasts mentioning the VOA is a very slight basis for judgment, the relative distinctiveness of the treatment of the VOA on this station suggests that it operates with a specially selected staff acting under separate directives and with different sources than those of the regular Soviet radio apparatus.

14 Discussions of domestic affairs within the satellites and of foreign relations among them were placed in the second category, whereas discussions of relations between the satellites and the USSR or the outside world were placed under the sixth category.

15 For an assessment of the current stereotyped image of Soviet propaganda as the product of masterful planning and of Soviet history as a long series of sweeping propaganda victories, see Alex Inkeles, “Communist Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda,” in The World Influence of Communism (Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Conference of the Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation, University of Chicago, 1953), pp. 263–75.

16 See Inkeles, , “The Soviet Characterization of the Voice of America,” op. cit. Google Scholar

17 The contribution of the major source groups to this total was as follows: foreign radio, 1,655; domestic radio, 215; newspapers, 429; and journals, 227.

18 The themes which were most prominent, and the percentage of all theme scores they captured were as follows: 21, “The VOA as a Mouthpiece of Reaction,” 14 percent; 14, “The United States as a Warmonger,” 12 percent; 12, “Political Objectives of American Foreign Policy,” 11 percent; 23, “The Failure of American Propaganda,” 11 percent; and 2, “The Economic Situation in the United States,” 9 percent. There was a definite break at this point, the next ranking theme accounting for only 4 percent of all theme scores.

19 Materials in the author's files.

20 “Broadcasts to the World in the Cold War Period and the Korean War Period,” prepared by the Research Center for Human Relations at New York University.

21 The coding system used in the study by the Research Center for Human Relations scored themes on the basis of the paragraph, as against the use of the sentence in this study. In addition the samples were drawn by quite different methods.

22 These data are taken from Appendix Table A of the study by the Research Center for Human Relations cited above. The figures given in that study for the Spring of 1950 and the Winter of 1950-1951 have been averaged here to obtain the percentage cited as applying to 1950–1951.

23 The relative consistency of theme emphasis in Soviet references to the VOA is most striking. The same five or six themes, and in roughly the same rank order, were most prominent not only in each of the major groups of references (foreign-domestic, press-radio), but also maintained their standing from country to country and from one journal or newspaper to the next.

24 Materials in the files of A. I.

25 For a full discussion see, Inkeles, , “The Soviet Characterization of the Voice of America,” op. cit. Google Scholar

26 See Table 1. This trend is even more apparent when the totals used include all references found in our survey rather than merely those yielded by the standard base total.