Public opinion is big business.
As of 2011, there were more than
7,000 public relations firms in
the United States alone.
These companies work on behalf of
corporations, trade organizations, or
individuals who hope to put
a positive spin on their image.
Whether it's a celebrity trying to salvage
his or her reputation after a meltdown,
a musician promoting an album, or
business combating negative press.
Chances are, you've recently encountered
PR work and you might not have known.
There's no denying the importance of
this multi-billion dollar industry,
but what exactly is it,
how does it work, and who invented it?
>> We often talk about the propaganda
being relatively recent, but or
course it isn't.
Even in ancient societies
that weren't democratic,
especially large states it was
understood by elites that,
if you don't have the support of
the people you could be in trouble.
And so a fair bit of attention
was actually given to
legitimizing military adventures.
>> Propaganda and persuasion have
been around for centuries, eons.
But propaganda in its modern sense
can be traced to the 15th and
16th century, when the Catholic Church
was in a tough competition with
the Protestants over how to articulate
a religious vision for the world.
And the reason that I mention this
is that it shows that propaganda is
about mindset, it's about ideology,
it's about world view.
How people see things as distinct
from individual policy or
whether you happen to like this
candidate or that candidate.
So, that's where the word came from for
propagating the faith.
And that's the way the word was used
up until the early 20th century.
And then what emerged, particularly
with World War I, was the application
of this propagating the faith,
to refer to international affairs,
to refer to what a national government
would do, a national security policy.
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>> There were clear warning signs
long before the age of the invent.
During the assault on Serbia,
under President Clinton,
a report emerged,
by the Dutch journalist, Abe De Vries,
revealing the presence of
Psy warriors working at CNN.
They derived from the third psychological
operations battalion at Fort Bragg in
North Carolina.
De Vries quoted Major Thomas Collins
of the US Army information service.
Psyops personnel, soldiers and
officers have been working in CNN's
headquarters in Atlanta through our
program training with industry.
They helped in the production of news.
[MUSIC]
What made the Iraq War different were not
so much the tactics or even the scale, but
the high tech synergy.
It was almost impossible to tell where the
state ended and the Fourth Estate began.
>> One of the things that we don't wanna
do is to destroy the infrastructure of
Iraq because in a few days
we're gonna own that country.
>> Should they have used more?
Should they use a MOAB, the mother of
all bombs and a few daisy cutters.
And let's not just stop at
a couple of [INAUDIBLE]
>> You're only 40 [CROSSTALK]
>> The invasion of Iraq
represents a pinnacle of domestic
psy-war in the United States.
An unparalleled integration
between public relations firms,
corporate media, and military psyops.
At the time of the assault, large segments
of the American public were convinced that
a nuclear attack by Saddam Hussein on
their nation was not only possible,
but imminent.
Soldiers who comprised the invading
force were similarly confused.
With a remarkable 77% believing
that Hussein was responsible for
the attacks of 9/11.
[MUSIC]
Many earnestly believed that the mission
was to destroy a mysterious group known as
Al-Qaeda while bringing
freedom to the Iraqi people.
Yet but what was actually happening,
was what the Nuremberg charger
describes as the single greatest
crime under international law.
The planning, preparation, initiation,
or waging of a war of aggression.
[SOUND]
[MUSIC]
Seven years later,
the results of the invasion are clear.
According to the Lancet, one of Britain's
most respected medical journals,
approximately 600,000 Iraqis had been
killed from the invasion as of 2006.
By 2009, a polling agency put
the number at over 1 million.
4 million Iraqi have been made
refugees in their own country,
their entire society is shattered.
[MUSIC]
How did the land of the free and the home
of the brave arrive at a place where
citizens could be manipulated with such
efficiency, and on such a massive scale?
[MUSIC]
>> Ivy Lee went to work for
among other clients the Rockefellers,
the Rockefeller family after
the Ludlow massacre used Ivy Lee to
manage the public perception around
that event and other events.
Ivy Lee's specialty was crisis management.
Among other things, he's credited with
inventing the press release which all of
us just sort of think of
as something helpful.
You wanna publicize an event,
a church picnic, call a news conference,
you put out a press release.
But at the time the idea was very radical
because what Ivy Lee was saying is, well,
we're gonna manage this crisis
by calling attention to it.
We're gonna actually assist and help the
news media and journalists in covering it.
What he knew was that the degree to
which journalists became used to and
dependent on his services was the degree
to which he could actually cultivate and
manage coverage.
[MUSIC]
>> He began by waging
a disinformation campaign.
He put up news bulletins claiming that
the 2 women and 11 children at Ludlow,
had not been killed by militia,
but by an overturned stove.
He circulated stories
suggesting that Mother Jones,
in addition to being a labor organizer
was a modern Haryana Bordello.
He ghost wrote letters to the governor and
even the President Wilson.
Lee's techniques achieved little success,
in part because he himself had
become a highly visible figure.
[SOUND] In the future, PR experts would
learn that their techniques are rarely
effective unless practiced in the dark.
Yet, one of Lee's innovations
was epoch making.
Upon learning that the Rockefeller
Foundation had $100 million set aside for
promotional purposes.
He convinced Rockefeller to donate large
sums to colleges hospitals, churches,
and charitable organizations,
in order to generate positive publicity.
He also suggested that Rockefeller Senior
begin handing out money in public,
and that Junior appear in
staged photo ups at work sites.
What Ivy Lee understood was that
the corporation needed a makeover.
Widely perceived as greedy,
tyrannical institutions,
corporations needed to manufacture
an image of worth and caring.
>> This is the beginning of
the public relations industry.
Rockefeller didn't set up
the Rockefeller Foundation until
Rockefeller became very unpopular
because of his labor policies and
suddenly they Rockville and
needed to create a good impression.
>> Well, it's an interesting phenomenon
that the poor actually give a larger
percentage of their income than the rich.
And I think the rich feel
they're doing more because,
giving 100,000 dollars seems like
a substantial kind of donation and
it doesn't matter that
they have 100 million,
they still think they've done quite a lot.
>> Ive Lee went to work for the IG Farben
company, the German industrial company and
we know now that IG Farben Was actually
part of the Nazi propaganda inner circle.
One of the most effective and
of course horrifying government propaganda
campaigns ever organized was the Nazi
campaign that continued for years and
years under the direction of Nazi
propaganda administer Joseph Goebbels.
Ivy Lee, and
also paid Ivy Lee's son to represent,
not just their interests, but
the interests of Nazi Germany
in an effort to paint the Nazi
regime as being a friendly regime.
>> But before lending his
expertise to the Third Reich, Mr.
Lee would do so for
the American government.
Along with other experts in
the burgeoning field of mind science and
public relations, he would engineer
propaganda for World War I.
Not just against the enemy,
the Germans, but
against the American people themselves.
In republic and
parliamentary democracy alike,
citizens would be reduced
to passive observers.
They would be allowed to pick and
choose which individual make
decisions on their behalf.
But they would not be able to
make those decisions themselves.
Returning to the period after the first
World War I, we find widespread support
amongst intellectuals from Madison's
elitist interpretation of democracy.
According to Walter Lippmann,
the public's function in politics was
to be interested spectators of action.
Than non-participants.
[MUSIC]
Yet, Lippmann perceived a problem.
New technologies in communication and
transportation had awakened millions of
disenfranchised people to a new world
outside their towns and cities.
While traditional economic, political,
and social structures remained in place.
Something had to change, but
rather than advocate structural changes in
society's institutions, Lippman suggested
that propaganda readjust the public mind.
>> In his essays on
democracy in the 1920s,
which are incidentally called
progressive essays on democracy,
he was a Wilson, Roosevelt,
Kennedy [INAUDIBLE] American sense.
He says that the majority
are simply incompetent.
They are ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders in his view,
that's the majority of the population.
And to allow them to participate in
the decision making would be a complete
disaster.
>> So therefore we have to
design means to ensure that
what he called the responsible men,
of whom he was of course one,
are protected from the roar and
the trampling of the beasts,
the ignorant majority.
[MUSIC]
>> [SOUND]
>> And he devised a number of methods.
Lippmann called it manufacture of consent.
We have to manufacture the consent of
the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.
The mass of the population and
the huge public relations industry
was developed at the same time.
They are the people who manage and
control the marketing exercises that
are called elections in the United States.
They are marketing exercises,
and they're well aware of it.
>> Apparently, we have all been wrong.
It is pronounced California.
Ladies and gentlemen, the governor of the
great state of California, Arnold My God.
[MUSIC]
>> So, for example, in the last election,
2008, the advertising industry gives
a prize every year for
the best marketing campaign of the year.
2008, they gave it to the Obama campaign,
who beat out commercial competitors.
The idea is, we market candidates
the same way we market toothpaste or
life style drugs or automobiles.
Of course it helps to have
a lot of money and in fact,
Obama greatly outspent McCain and
not because of popular contributions.
It came mostly from financial oil
industries, he was their candidate.
And his policies all predictably
respond to his constituency.
[MUSIC]
>> Prominent intellectuals continue to
argue that world's complexity makes
democracy impossible.
A recent cover story in
TIME Magazine claimed that,
democracy is in the worst
interest of national goals.
The modern world is too
complex to allow the man or
woman in the street to
interfere in its management.
[MUSIC]
A man who surely would have
agreed was Edward Bernays.
Like Litman, Bernays served as
a propagandist on the Creel committee, and
like Litman, he went on to
refashion wartime propaganda.
For peacetime aims.
[MUSIC]
In his classic text Propaganda,
Bernay suggested that elite regiment
the public mind every bit as much
as an army regiments their bodies.
Bernay considered mass mind control so
crucial that it constituted in his words,
the very essence of
the democratic process.
Bernay's opportunity to shine arose when a
crises threatened not only the profits of
major corporations but
the entire capitalist system.
The solution as theorized by business
leaders would lead to social breakdown,
environmental catastrophe, and further
alienation between the American people and
their government.
It would also lead to wealth on
a scale never before imagined.
[MUSIC]
>> The problem of capitalism is
the problem of consumption, and
the problem is that after your
basic needs have been met,
there is no real need for consumption.
And so you have to convince people that
in fact their identities are based upon
the consumption of objects for
which there is no material need.
That's the problem that comes
from the expansion of the market.
If you look at advertising,
it's a very interesting history.
In the first period of advertising,
we can say right up until about the 1920s,
Advertising talked about goods themselves.
It talked about how they were made,
what they did, how well they lasted, etc,.
It really is a discourse about objects,
about what goods did.
However, starting around 1920,
that changes, and from that period on,
advertising doesn't really
talk about good themselves.
They talk about the relationship
of goods to our needs.
>> At the center of the new
strategy was Edward Bernays.
If Walter Litman had concerned
himself with an overarching analysis
of mass media and democracy, Bernays would
devote most of his energies to propaganda
on behalf of the corporation.
His uncle, Sigmund Freud,
would serve as his muse.
Rather than focus on the intrinsic
worth of a particular product,
Bernay's suggested a strategy
where products became linked
with the unconscious
desires of the public.
In this manner there would be virtually
no limits to either production or
consumption.
>> Freud's nephew was a man
by the name of Bernay.
And he's regarded as the father
of modern public relations,
particularly in the United States.
His contribution if you want to
call it that was to take propaganda
techniques that have been developed for
military psychological warfare,
national security type
issues during World War I.
and apply them in a systematic
way to commercial issues.
One of his best known efforts had to do
with encouraging females, women to smoke.
He would stage beauty pageants.
He would stage what are today would be
called photo ops and that sort of thing.
In which smoking by women was
portrayed as women's liberation.
Was portrayed as a way to be free and
empowered is getting addicted to nicotine.
The audience, the market in Bernay's
mind had a clear desire to be free,
to be stronger,
to be more self- empowered.
So women clearly wanted these things along
comes Bernays in the tobacco industry and
says here is how to have it.
>> The major story that advertising
tells us about human happiness is that
the way to happiness is through
the consumption of things.
That, in fact, buying something in
the marketplace will make you happy.
In fact, that's the message
of almost every single ad.
And it's not often that you can say,
that there's one message that is in
the literally millions of ads
that are produced every year.
Well actually I think that is the message,
the message of advertising as a whole is
that it's better to buy
than to not to buy.
That in fact the way to become, and
that you'll happier as a result
of buying than not buying.
That idea in fact I think
is the major force for
global social change
over the last 50 years.