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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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>> 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.
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>> 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.
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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.
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>> [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.
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>> 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.
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>> 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.
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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.
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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.