in America and Russia, or in France and China, is not really in touch with the medium. Are we to suppose that this kind of media illiteracy is characteristic only of Westerners, and that Russians know how to correct the bias of the medium in order to read it right? Or do people vaguely suppose that the heads of state in the various countries of the world know that the newspaper has totally diverse effects in different cultures? There is no basis for such assumptions. Unawareness of the nature of the press in its subliminal or latent action is as common among politicians as among political scientists. For example, in oral Russia both Pravda and Izvestia handle domestic news, but the big international themes come to the West over Radio Moscow. In visual America, radio and television handle the domestic stories, and international affairs get their formal treatment in Time magazine and The New York Times. As a foreign service, the bluntness of Voice of America in no way compares to the sophistication of the BBC and Radio Moscow, but what it lacks in verbal content it makes up in the entertainment value of its American jazz. The implications of this difference of stress are important for an understanding of the kinds of opinions and decisions natural to an oral, as opposed to a visual, culture. A friend of mine who tried to teach something about the forms of media in secondary school was struck by one unanimous response. The students could not for a moment accept the suggestion that the press or any other public means of communication could be used with base intent. They felt that this would be akin to polluting the air or the water supply, and they didn't feel that their friends and relatives employed in these media would sink to such corruption. Failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the program "content" of our media while ignoring the form, whether it be radio or print or the English language itself. There have been countless Newton Minows (formerly head of the Federal Communications Commission) to talk about the Wasteland of the Media, men who