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Edward Bernays on propaganda and public relations with a polemic insert from Steven Pinker's 'The Staff of Thought'. Can elite bards and scribblers create new metaphors to manipulate public opinion? I think they can, and apparently they do.According to the The Government Accounting Office, the Bush administration spent $1.6 billion over the last two and a half years on public relations operations. That's $1.6 billion of our tax money commandeered for, among other things, O.T.I. -style partisan propaganda here at home, aimed at affecting domestic elections. Included in this figure is a mysterious $15 million paid directly to individual members of the media. This information comes on the tail of previous disclosures concerning covert propaganda operations including the production of fake TV news stories and Bush administrationpayoffs to crooked journalists to slant stories even further in a pro-Bush direction than the normal corporate media spin.
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Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays [The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on. So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques. This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques— models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual. —Noam Chomsky (From Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream": a talk at Z Media Institute, June 1997) Contents I. ORGANIZING CHAOS II. THE NEW PROPAGANDA III. THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS IV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS V. BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC VI. PROPAGANDA AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP VII. WOMEN'S ACTIVITIES AND PROPAGANDA VIII.