Propaganda
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“Bernays’ honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”—Noam Chomsky “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”—Edward Bernays, Propaganda A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon. Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses. This is the first reprint of Propaganda in over 30 years and features an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder .
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Bernays can only be applauded for his scrupulous position, which reflected his lifelong commitment to a stringent code of ethics for all p.r. specialists. But the issue here is not so much ethical as epistemological. In a world under the influence of propaganda experts, how does a costly truth get out into the world as truth? When is an idea no longer just a crackpot theory, a paranoid delusion of the left or right, but something that must be, and finally is, accepted? Bernays’s eventual stand on cigarettes was admirable indeed, especially considering his own prodigious work, from the mid-Thirties, for George Washington Hill’s American Tobacco Company. (The propagandist helped Hill sell a lot of Lucky Strikes.) The risks of smoking were, however, evident before the antismoking propaganda started picking up momentum in the Fifties. As early as 1941, the independent journalist George Seldes was intrepidly reporting on the pertinent medical discoveries in his tiny muckraking journal, In Fact. With the exception of the Reader’s Digest, no other American news source, print or broadcast, dared even to hint at what tobacco scientists were finding out—an advertising-induced blackout that persisted, by and large, until the Seventies. Such was the clout of the tobacco companies, which used Bernays’s sort of propaganda genius to keep most people blithely unaware of what they were inhaling.
Although Bernays did see the light about tobacco, then, and did the honorable thing, the fact is that corporate propaganda squelches inconvenient journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate, and growing ills receive no mass attention. As with the risks of smoking, so it has been, until very recently, with global warming, and so it is today with the carcinogenicity of cell phones, and the toxic side effects of fluoride, just to name a few underreported threats to public health. In all such cases, the investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest, while the latter tends to work against it.
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