Propaganda Model

Public Opinion Series

Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, 1988, Excerpts

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. The structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling; however, dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

The democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth. The standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality. The media serve and propagandize on behalf of the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. These interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.

The essential ingredients of our propaganda model:

[1] concentrated ownership of the dominant mass-media firms

[2] advertising as the primary income source of the mass media

[3] information provided by government, business, and “experts”

[4] “flak” as a means of disciplining the media

[5] “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.

The Organization

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen, whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their organized following administer human affairs. In American politics we call it a machine, or “the organization.”

There are a number of important distinctions between the members of the machine and the rank and file. The leaders, the steering committee and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environment. There are particular men they hope to see elected, particular balance sheets they wish to see improved, concrete objectives that must be attained. They decide. They give orders. They bargain. The Many can elect after the Few have been nominated. The art of inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is practiced in every political campaign.

The size of a man’s income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond the neighborhood. With money he can overcome obstacles of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals. The income of the individual and the income of the community determine the amount of communication that is possible. Differences of income make a profound difference in contact and opportunity. From the existence of differing economic situations you can tentatively infer a probable difference of opinions. If men are economically situated in different ways, they can then be induced to hold certain views.

The Government

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Political bodies set armies in motion or make peace, conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another, facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim “policies,” and “destiny,” raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against another.

Representative government cannot be worked successfully unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.

Visual Aids

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.

Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea, and next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays, moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction for the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted. We find gifted men who can visualize for us, for people are not all endowed to the same degree with the pictorial faculty. We paint pictures, stage dramas, and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

Public Opinion Perceptions

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine. We have to summarize and generalize. We have to pick out samples, and treat them as typical.

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.

Our public opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice, class feeling and what not. The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class. The necessary simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in view of the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions operate.

Crystallizing Public Opinion

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

The living impressions of a large number of people are to an immeasurable degree personal in each of them, and unmanageably complex in the mass. How do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystallized?

For the most part, we do not first see and then define, instead we define first and then see. We imagine most things before we experience them, and those preconceptions govern deeply the whole process of perception. We pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock images.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by him or given to him. The way in which the world is imagined at any particular moment determines what men will do. It determines their efforts, their feelings, and their hopes. The only feeling that anyone can have about an event they do not experience is the feeling aroused by their mental image of that event.

The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.

Father of Spin by  Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts 

While scholars still debate the extent to which the Nazis used Bernay’s works, Goebbels did employ techniques nearly identical to those used by Bernays – skillfully exploiting symbols by making Jews into scapegoats and Hitler into the embodiment of righteousness; manipulating the media by trumpeting Nazi triumphs on the battlefield and hiding their extermination campaigns; and vesting unheard-of power in state propaganda just as Bernays had advised in Crystallizing. “His methods are largely identical with those portrayed in Chapters VI and XI of Mein Kampf.”

 

Guatemala Overthrow Campaign

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Bernays presented to United Fruit boss Samuel Zemurray his plan for “psychological activities aimed at developing a better climate of public opinions.” He counseled United Fruit to scream so loud that the United States would step in to check this threat so near its border. Bernays warned that Guatemala was ripe for revolution and that the Communists were gaining increasing influence over Guatemala’s leaders.

Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and other publications, all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala’s Communists. Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was a relative of Bernay’s wife, Doris. A surprising number of respected reporters seemed not to know or care the fact that Bernays worked for a firm with huge economic interests at stake. What mattered was that his releases were filled with facts they could quickly transform into stories.

In January 1952, he took a group of journalists on a two-week tour of the region. With him were the publishers of Newsweek, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Nashville Banner, and the New Orleans Item, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, and the Christian Science Monitor. The results of his trips to the Tropics were beyond dispute: more and more stories were sounding an alarm about Guatemala.

Events in Guatemala were firing up. The Eisenhower administration, which assumed office in 1953, stepped up the pressure on Arbenz. The fruit company had powerful friends in the Eisenhower administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose law firm had represented United Fruit.

The Guatemalan president responded by hardening his stance, and month by month, the situation edged toward confrontation. The final showdown began on June 18, 1954, when Carlos Castillo Armas, an army officer living in exile, crossed the border from Honduras with two hundred men recruited and trained by the CIA – a band Bernays referred to as an “army of liberation.” This “invasion,” supported by a CIA air attack, quickly achieved its goal, and on June 27 a military junta took control of Guatemala. Armas was named president a week later.

United Fruit was the most important force in toppling Arbenz and Bernays was the fruit company’s most effective propagandist. Propaganda was the key ingredient in undermining the Guatemalans. “A hostile and ill-informed American press helped to create an emotional public opinion. This, in turn, worked on Congress and, ultimately, on the State Department.”

Vietnam

In 1961, history seemed to be repeating itself. Bernays was advising a New York advertising agency that was working for the government of South Vietnam just as America was ratcheting up its involvement there. And his advice included precisely the sort of campaign he had engineered on behalf of Guatemala.

John Foster Dulles