A 1950 Korean leaflet that put MacArthur's face on a radio schedule

A Korean-language leaflet from the United Nations Command's psychological warfare service in 1950. Nearly the whole sheet is a halftone portrait of General Douglas MacArthur; four short lines under it ask readers to tune to 950 kilocycles at nine every night for news from his headquarters.

The sheet

The general fills the paper: uniform, peaked cap, a photograph reproduced in halftone dots. There is no slogan above him and no cartoon beside him. The text is a single sentence broken over four lines at the foot, and the line breaks fall in the middle of words, as if the lettering was fitted to the space left over.

매일밤 九시에 950 킬로싸이클

로 매아더 총사령부에서 보내드

리는 정확한 뉴-스 방송을 꼭

들으시기 바랍니다.

Who issued it

FRAME credits the United Nations Command and U.S. Army psychological warfare under the Far East Command, and classes the source as openly identified: the sheet names MacArthur's headquarters as the broadcaster. The image is the front of a leaflet that Wikimedia Commons files as Korean War leaflet No. 1004. Only that face is in the record. The rights line records it as public domain, a U.S. military work.

How to read it

This leaflet does not argue. It advertises. Its job was to send the reader to a different medium, the radio, where the argument would be made every night at a fixed hour. In that sense it is a piece of plumbing in a larger campaign, and the record holds only this end of the pipe. What the nine o'clock bulletins said is not in the archive.

FRAME tags it transfer and glittering generalities. Both fit. The sheet offers one reason to trust the broadcast, and it is the commander's face. The one adjective, "accurate," is a promise the paper cannot keep for itself. A listener could only test it against what happened, and the sheet gives him nothing to test it with.

A free reader would ask the same question of any government's news service, including his own: who edits it, and what are they allowed to leave out? The leaflet does not answer, and it does not pretend to be anything other than the commander's channel. That candor about the speaker is worth noting. Many later sheets in the same war printed no issuer at all, like leaflet 7230. The same headquarters signed MacArthur's August 1950 letter on prisoners. The rest of the war's leaflets are gathered under US and UN Command messaging in the Korean War.