Evening star., 1955-03-08

WHEN THEODORE C. STREIBERT goes
over to Congress one day soon to ask for an
other s100 million for his United States Infor-
! nation Administration (USIA) he is going to
get very little help from Eugene W. Castle.
Mr., Castle, the noted film editor, has re-
! Gently gone all around the world (unoffcially
and at his own expense) to get look at how
Mr.. Streibert's 1911 l.. S. press agents are
/ doing at SELLING America" to other peoples.
His conclusion, forcefully expressed in his
I just-pubished book Billions, Blunders and
Baloney," is that they are not doing. very well.
1t is a book that ought to be required read
! ing fr any Congressman who plans to vote on
: next years federal appropriations.
The United States is generally agreed to be
the one country on earth where saleSmanship,
and the persuasive publicity that makes it
possible, has reached the highest peak of per-
fection.
Every American is surrounded every day of
!: his life with innumerable examples of this fine
art which decide for him what he will eat and
wear and buy and play and ride in and go to
hear and even bolieve-so smoothly he doesn't
even know it is being DONE That is American
: advertising and publicity
The superb skills which do all this ought to
make 1t quite easy to convince the peoples of
/: the rest of the world that the American Way
of Life is the best there is-especially since the
!: proposition is demonstrably true.
NOTHING INDICATES that they have,
though.
On the contrary, after examining the spend
ing of more than S400 million on propaganda
abroad Rep. Cliff Clevenger (R o. sadly told
Mr.. Streibert that "where you have spent the
most money there is also the most lamentable
condition afterward. And Sen. Pat McCarran
sald Il have not seen any results from the
money we have spent"
If lS indeed ohar Sir o., oil hot 60,
all our propaganda about how likeable we are
practically nobody likes us - and those who
have had the most propaganda like us the least.
MIR. CASTLE reports that very high pro-
portion of the 10,11 USIA "propagandists"
(about enough in numbers to staff entirely the
100 largest newspapers in the United States)
were merely wide-eyed amateurs without train
ing, experience or skills in the field in which
they work, recruited from those unqualified to
get or hold jobs in those lines at home.
He found that almost none of the vast flood
of f"propaganda material that flows constantly
from USlA ever even reaches any citizen of
another nation, and that if it did it would con-
vince them of nothing worth while to the
United States.
That is easy to believe. Every newspaper
editor in America gets in the mail flood of
'press releases" from the agencies of other ma
tions-Britain, Israel, Spain, Turkey, France,
China (both Chinas, in fact) Korea, India and
so on, to mention only few of the more regu-
lar arrivals at my own desk.
None of this is read, even by the editor and
certainly not by the readers of his newspaper.
1t goes directly into editorial wastebaskets
(Which are, of necessity, large). All editors
know it is propaganda and consequently not to
be trusted.
And all newspapers have their own sources
of information which they know they can trust
for news of those countries. Naturally they
rely on those sources-whether they are U. S.
editors or those in other nations.
USIA, it develops, doesn't even wait on the
mails. 1t spends some additional millions year
sending 60O0-word-a-day "press release" by
radio to U. s. embassies and consulates all
over the world for distribution to local news
papers. The sole result of this extra speed ap-
parently is that the stuff reaches editorial
wastebaskets some hours earlier that way.
MIR. CASTLE found USIA moving pictures
and radio programs also reaching very few
people abroad. Theatcr operators in other ma
tions are no more inclined to put propaganda