Every day, millions of messages invade our screens.
Their aim: to direct our choices in purchasing, voting or adhering to an idea.
They are omnipresent and shape our vision of the world.
They rely on persuasion techniques invented a century ago in the United States.
They were developed in less than 50 years by a small group of thinkers
in order to control the masses.
To impose their power, authoritarian regimes used force;
Western democracies invented public relations.
One of the group's leading theoreticians was Edward Bernays.
Public relations embraces
what I call the engineering of consent
based on Thomas Jefferson’s principles :
that in a democratic society
everything depends on the consent of the people.
On April 6th 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
Within weeks, huge numbers of Americans had enlisted in the military.
Their president, Woodrow Wilson,
had convinced them to shed blood in the defense of democracy.
And yet, one year earlier,
this same president had promised Americans
they would not enter into World War One.
When the President of the United States,
Woodrow Wilson ran for office in 1916,
he ran under the slogan, "He kept us out of war. "
There was this idea that this war was a European matter,
it had nothing to do with American democracy, so to speak.
So, as the United States began to prepare to enter into the war,
there was a big problem.
The debate within the Wilson White House was:
how do we control the masses in order to prosecute the war?
Wilson wanted to impose his choices by force,
but inside the White House, others advocated a different solution.
Several Wilson advisers argued:
We can create a system through the government
of mass propaganda
that will in essence seduces the masses
into supporting the war effort.
We need to build up an armament of the mind.
We need to build up a machinery
that will sell the war to the American people, that will advertise the war.
A huge propaganda campaign was deployed,
based on the codes of the advertising and entertainment industries.
The biggest stars of the day,
like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks,
were called on to stir up the crowds.
Thousands of other influential people were specially selected
to carry the government's message across the country.
Businessmen, ministers,
other people who were respected authorities within a local area
would get up and give a speech on behalf of the war.
Before the movie starts some man
just almost spontaneously gets up and
gives a 4-minute talk about why we should go to war.
To orchestrate this immense machine,
Wilson set up a special department:
the Creel Commission.
It was made up of the professionals of the PR world:
journalists, admen and press agents...
Among them was a young man of 26
who had already earned a solid reputation as a press agent
in the entertainment business.
His name: Edward Bernays.
Along with most members of the commission,
he shared a vision of the crowd
which was widespread among the leaders of the major Western democracies.
It rested on theories expanded on barely 20 years earlier
by the French polymath Gustave le Bon
whose book, The Crowd, a Study of the Popular mind,
established the ground-rules of crowd psychology.
It basically makes an argument
that these people are incapable of rational thought,
they're incapable of being approached and reasoned with.
They have become microbes.
They are driven, they become like a virus.
Animals driven by their spinal cord.
He lays out an anatomy of the crowd
as a group of people who can't understand reason.
And since reason has no effect on crowds,
governments appealed to their instincts and emotions.
It very quickly moves to using psychological approaches
that try to bypass, in fact, critical thought
and touch people in the gut.
Well, the war demonized the German hun.
And that’s how you got the stories of…
the fictitious stories of all
the bayoneting babies in Belgium and all this kind of stuff.
A lot of it has to do with using symbols
that are very powerful and deeply ingrained,
which in many ways degrade
the meaning of what's actually being said
and instead promote and focus on the level of feeling.
It succeeded in converting a pacifist public
into raving anti-German fanatics
The Boston Symphony Orchestra
couldn’t play Beethoven for example because
we don’t want to touch this hideous monstrosity.
And the Creel Commission was very effective.
In less than a year,
the Creel Commission managed to turn public opinion around,
without the use of force and without changing the system of governance.
For the great captains of industry,
like the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the JP Morgans,
the success of these propaganda methods opened up perspectives
which came at just the right moment.
Since the late 19th century,
a succession of strikes,
protests and riots had been rocking the whole country.
The rise of industrial capitalism, not just in the United States,
but throughout the industrializing world,
caused a level of immiseration.
In the coal fields and the industrial plants,
the steel mills lived a little better than serfs.
Unions were broken and outlawed…
So, it was a real battle between…
let’s call the masses and the oligarchs.
People who were at the top of these corporations
were regarded as simply as robbing the rest of society of the resources
by accumulating profits for themselves as personal wealth.
In 1914,
the situation had reached crisis point.
Rockefeller was suspected of being responsible for the massacre of 66 strikers
at one of his coal mine in Ludlow
and narrowly escaped an assassination attempt carried out by an anarchist.
The corporate sector were totally freaked out
about the possibility of their world being taken over.
They saw the Creel Commission's methods
as ideal solutions for putting an end to social demands.
If it was possible to convince Americans to wholeheartedly back the war effort
without questioning the principles of democracy,
it would clearly be possible to persuade the working classes to adhere to a system
they had until then always rejected:
capitalism.
After experiencing
this world situation
and recognizing the importance of ideas as weapons,
I decided to see whether we could not apply
what I had learned in the war to peace time pursuits.
In 1919,
Edward Bernays opened his first office in New York,
one of the country's main seats of power.
To define his role for his future clients, he styled himself
as a "Public Relations Counsel".
Propaganda came to have a bad name so they invented other terms for it and
Edward BERNAYS was very clear about that,
he took credit himself
for coming up with the term Public Relations counsel
in order to give
what was propaganda a new lease of life by calling it something different.
And that's the time-honoured technique of Public Relations of propaganda,
if something is unpopular
just call it something else so then no one will know.
Edward Bernays was influenced
by one of the most renowned American intellectuals of the day,
journalist and author, Walter Lippmann.
This former advisor to Woodrow Wilson saw propaganda
as the only true tool for controlling the crowd;
a theory to which he consecrated a book
which would revolutionize the principles of democratic governance:
"Public Opinion".
The responsible men, which is us,
have to take charge and
we have to be
protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.
We can’t do it by force,
the best way to do it is by what Lippmann called "Manufacture of Consent"
a new art and the practice of democracy.
And what he means is that skilful propaganda
can, in essence, get the masses
to support policies that are against their own interests…
These new specialists in public relations -
most of them former members of the Creel Commission -
were hired by the biggest companies of the day.
Their mission:
to convince public opinion that the prosperity of private enterprises
would benefit the entire population.
To do so,
a radical change was required:
turn the citizen into a consumer.
Buying should no longer be a question of necessity but of desire.
We were going crazy as an economy
and we were building big companies
and we were trying to bring the public along
to buy all the things that these –
the products these companies were anxious to produce.
Business needed to sell itself to the people
and also to sell the idea that business,
rather than socialism, will provide the good life.
Edward Bernays would become an expert on the subject.
One of his first successes was a campaign
carried out for the Beech-nut Packing Company,
the famous producer of bacon.
They wanted to be the biggest bacon maker in America.
And the normal way a company would have done that
was to go out and compete and say
we have a better bacon than the other competing bacon makers.
Eddie Bernays said that’s not the way to do it.
We want to enlarge the market for everybody.
Edward Bernays would rely on a concept
which had brought success to the Creel Commission:
opinion leadership.
He decided to use the powerful influence
of one of the most respected professions in society:
doctors.
And so, he went out and had a survey commissioned
asking lots of doctors and other trusted people
in the field of nutrition and health,
"Do you think that the notion of an all of a hearty breakfast is a useful thing?
Should we be eating what he called a hearty breakfast?"
The study concluded that a hearty breakfast was good for the health.
Edward Bernays sent the result to 4000 doctors across the country.
Unwittingly, they would pass on to their patients a message
whose purpose was purely commercial.
If you don’t like bacon
and you’re interested in your health,
and 4000 doctors say
“you better eat bacon”, you’ll do it.
Mmmm!
Bacon and eggs, and buttered toast.
There’s nothing like a good healthy breakfast to start the day off right.
And a meal like this should satisfy anyone.
You have to learn that food has a lot to do
with the way you look and the way you feel.
The American breakfast became an institution,
a cultural reference that would enjoy a long and healthy life!
A breakfast without bacon and eggs
is like, I don't know,
a dog without a bone.
The idea of following a trusted leader, taking advice from an authority figure,
is the foundation of everything that we do in public relations.
In a repeated national survey,
doctors and all branches of medicines,
doctors in all parts of the country were asked :
What cigarette do you smoke Doctor?
Scientific backing, given by doctors,
became a PR tool much used by advertisers...
...going as far as promoting the cigarette
as a product for health and well-being.
"The cigarette so many doctors enjoy."
Edward Bernays was constantly on the lookout for innovative tools
to improve his powers of persuasion.
He was particularly drawn to psychoanalysis.
So much so that he oversaw the translation
of the first works of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
into English.
But the bond between them was more than strictly professional:
Edward Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud!
Bernays had a very close relationship both
familial and also emotional relationship with Sigmund Freud.
Bernays'mother was Sigmund Freud's sister.
Bernays' father's sister was married to Sigmund Freud.
So there's a lot of genetic material from Freud inside of Bernays.
And as a child
he would sit at the dinner table night after night
while his parents would be talking about
Uncle Siggy
Well, I heard about my uncle’s theory of dream interpretation,
I heard about psychology as being an important force
in evaluating human behaviour.
I heard of repression and regression and suppression.
Eddie Bernays was what I like to call, a professional nephew.
and he used his connection in the first 10 minutes that you met him,
you learned that he was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud
because that somehow gave him not just the sense of being associated
with the famous person
but being associated with a smart
opinion-changing, you know, revolutionary character like Sigmund Freud.
The concepts that Bernays took from Freud was that people
They think they're ruled by their own judgment and rational thinking
but they're not, they're ruled by their unconscious or their subconscious
and they don't even know it.
So you have to bypass their logic.
Edward Bernays would put this concept into practice
for the first time for one of his clients,
the American Tobacco Company.
The Company felt it was the victim of a social taboo
which prevented it from doubling its profits:
Women were not allowed to smoke in public.
So the Company entrusted Edward Bernays with the task of turning women
into open tobacco consumers, just like men.
He went to see one of his uncle's Sigmund's disciples here, this guy named A. A. Brill.
He goes to see Brill.
He says: "Brill, you know I'm trying to sell cigarettes to women,"
"what do they represent?"
And Brill says: "Well this is simple. They represent the penis".
And all women, they have penis envy.
So in fact if you can get them to have a penis,
or at least a symbolic penis,
this is something that they will respond to.
And since this was during the time of suffrage,
the suffrage movement which was 1919 and through the 20s,
women were still galvanized by trying to fight for their rights.
So he goes and recruits some of the leading socialites of the day,
he convinces these women that they’re going to be striking
a blow not for American Tobacco Company,
which they don’t know is his true client
but for women’s liberation.
To launch his PR campaign,
Edward Bernays decided to use a popular event as a springboard:
the famous annual Easter Parade in New York.
He has these women marching down Fifth Avenue
lighting up a cigarette that he calls their "torches of freedom"
and to ensure that this event isn’t missed, he recruits all the photographers
from all the leading newspapers and wire services around the world
to take a picture of that.
The next morning the New York Times had carried the story on its first page.
They treated it as news which it indeed was.
Within 5 weeks
the smoking rooms of theatres in New York
opened their smoking rooms to women smoking,
which had never happened before.
So an aged old custom was broken down..
...by one action.
The role of PR is creating circumstances that jut out from the normal society
and therefore which become newsworthy.
And so, part of the role of the public relations agent,
is the need to understand what looks like news,
what tastes like news, what smells like news.
To this day, creating news is the number one thing that we try to do.
And part of being newsworthy of course was doing something new
and being the first.
Nobody remembers the second guy who landed on the moon.
Within 10 years,
the consumption habits of Americans had deeply changed
thanks to the work carried out by public relations counsels.
They even managed to change and promote the image of the captains of industry.
John D. Rockefeller himself
was no longer seen as a hated figure of capitalism as he once was,
but as a generous philanthropist.
PR agencies prospered,
especially on Madison Avenue,
destined to become the epicentre of advertising in the United States.
Edward Bernays had become the most sought-after expert in public relations.
He moved into a luxury hotel suite
where he received all of the country's wealthiest and most influential men.
My father was immensely social.
He gave parties all the time.
High achievers came to his parties.
They were architects and artists, lawyers, politicians, magazine editors,
always people at the top.
Most people had no ideas who he was.
But the people who needed to know him
and who he needed to know him knew him.
In 1929,
Edward Bernays published Propaganda,
the fruit of 10 years' experience.
In it, he laid out with precision the main principles and techniques
of manipulating the masses in democracies.
The work elevated him to the status of visionary.
That kind of confession is evidence
of the fact that the power of propaganda is so immense
that even when the puppet masters are confessing,
those who are being manipulated can’t resist.
The Nazis incidentally were very impressed
with US commercial propaganda
the kind that Bernays and the PR industry was developing.
The Goebbels studied it carefully, refers to it.
They adapted it to their own purposes and very successfully unfortunately.
35000 homeless in Heaven’s ville…
The Wall Street Crash on October 24th 1929
tore apart the apparent balance of the 1920s model of the capitalist society.
The United States plunged into the Great Depression
which left tens of millions of Americans jobless and homeless.
the corporate system, the public relations had been selling
so hard throughout the 1920s,
was now considered to be the embodiment of evil.
We face that crisis.
We face it with singleness of purpose and above all with faith.
Elected president in 1932,
Franklin D. Roosevelt came across as the man who could change everything.
But to earn the people's trust,
the manufacture of consent would be a determining factor.
So he too he called upon experts in public relations.
Sitting down here next to me is Mrs Roosevelt, my wife, and
my granddaughter, Anna Roosevelt Dale.
On their advice,
Roosevelt took the leading role in an unprecedented PR campaign.
What’s our slogan campaign?
To appear as a man of the people,
he was systematically seen with his family, going about his daily life,
like no other president had been before him.
That is pure PR Bernays.
I mean absolutely pure, the way he sat in his car
and waved to people, this is Roosevelt,
as if he was a hearty young man, it’s all symbols.
But for Roosevelt, symbols weren't enough,
and he opted for another method: pedagogy -
explaining to his fellow citizens in simple terms
how he planned to put right the country and its economy.
He and his advisers developed the so-called "fireside chats",
a series of 28 radio addresses given by the president
spread over ten years.
It is 3 months my friends
since I have talked to the people of this country about our national problems.
I am going to establish a government market for gold in the US.
He had a very calming voice,
he talked to the listeners like people he respected, like an equal.
And I think the public was given faith by that.
I’m authorizing the Reconstruction finance corporation to buy or sell gold.
One after another, "The Fireside Chats"
are designed to make an inscrutable system legible to people.
City streets damaged by increasing traffic are modernized,
resurfaced, which means huge savings….
The president launched the production of a series of documentaries
aimed at explaining his flagship program, the New Deal,
the basic principles of which rested on government interventionism
to kick-start the economy.
...New modern housing developments will be erected,
providing better living conditions for workers in the low income groups.
But to get the intent of his program across,
the Roosevelt administration went a step further by putting together
a group of renowned photographers and writers
in order to show Americans
the terrible effects of the depression inside their own country.
It wasn't a bunch of flacks who came out of
the advertising industry or the public relations industry,
it was people who had really thought about
using images in a way that leave people smarter than they were.
The American people discovered an America
they had no idea existed.
The emotional and symbolic force of these pictures moved hearts and minds.
So that there is this resurgence
of an idea that emotion and reason don't need to be separated from each other.
To some extent it's manufacture of consent
but it's I think an attempt to create informed consent.
There’s nothing wrong with being persuasive,
as long as your persuasion is not interested in deception,
in turning people away from seeing things as they are.
Triumphantly re-elected in 1936,
Roosevelt sought to deploy new reforms to limit the power of companies and banks.
The decision is to create an alliance between
working people and a completely dismantled middle class
against great wealth and business.
It is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on,
and are going to be stepped on.
The business system views the New Deal as a catastrophe.
Almost every big corporation
in America was engaged in the National Association of Manufacturers,
and their biggest
program at the time was a public relations program.
They decide that they need to sell the idea
that private enterprise is the key to the good life
that Roosevelt is now suggesting the government can help be an advocate for.
Hello everybody, this is Lowell Thomas
and I have to ask one or two questions
which you have probably asked.
And then I intend to answer them.
To what new horizons can we look now?
Where are tomorrow’s opportunities?
The National Association of Manufacturers, NAM,
set out to re-establish as quickly as possible
the people's trust in the capitalist system.
To do so, they would fight the president's campaign
with a number of their own.
For 20 years,
NAM campaigns sought to sell an idealized version of society
which Americans clamoured for.
Wherever Roosevelt was selling reality,
NAM sold dreams.
Wherever Roosevelt was speaking to citizens,
NAM spoke to consumers.
It has to get out and see the many different ways.
It’s part of American DNA, we don’t like government,
we like private business.
They talked about free enterprise in the same way
you would talk about freedom and democracy and justice.
Yes they were selling a dream, but they tied to dream into American values.
This is a machine.
In the factory.
This is the workman
who turns the machine, in the factory.
To make Americans aware of the benefits of industry,
NAM also turned to pedagogy,
notably by addressing the consumers of tomorrow:
children.
Here is a farmer.
He needs a widget on his farm and he is in a hurry to buy one.
Here’s your money Mr “Widget maker”.
And here’s your widget Mr Farmer.
And all the customers take the widgets home to all parts of the country.
And to reach the greatest number,
large enterprises set out to meet Americans where they most liked to be:
at home.
Until the 1950s,
a traveling exhibition promoting cars and technologies crisscrossed America:
General Motors' "Parade of Progress".
Hey hold on there it’s absolutely free.
Come see the big time show.
This device has a dual personality.
He could actually freeze and fry at the same time.
And this machine brings your daily paper right to your easy chair.
Fantastic? Maybe.
Through the "Parade of Progress",
capitalism and the benefits of consumption were sold for over 20 years
as the foundations of the American dream.
These people who were engaged in these activities
played the long game.
That is to say even though many of them knew
that they would not live to see
their desires and their goals met, that didn't matter.
They were willing to do it over generations.
In 1939,
it was the city of New York which became showcase of the American way of life.
Our cameras sweep the horizon,
turning in the direction of a new world that symbolizes man’s dreams,
prophecy’s, hopes and aspirations.
For the first time,
they city hosted the World's Fair.
The event was one of the biggest PR operations in industrial history.
The director of public relations was none other than Edward Bernays.
Bernays's role was,
besides promoting it and talking about the different exhibits,
and getting companies to exhibit there,
such as General Motors,
which had been his client in the 30's.
He called it DemocraCity.
So what he was trying to do then was
merge together democracy and capitalism as one.
You have all of these companies creating pavilions
which are not about the present but are all about the future
and people of the future.
I mean, because the minute you start talking about the future
you can invent it any way you want.
The World's Fair has a famous documentary, which is about a family in the Midwest,
the son is a socialist,
the daughter, who lives in New York, is having an affair
with her art teacher who was a communist.
And so it's a story called The Middletons go to the Fair,
which takes them to the fair,
and particularly to the Westinghouse exhibit, because
Westinghouse Electric Company was the sponsor of the film.
I guess we’re a little early.
What do you want to do?
Anything but inspect this temple of capitalism.
- Oh Nick… - Look at them.
Their eyes popping out of their heads,
drowning on the very things that are taking away their jobs.
No Nick, don’t get all excited.
The grandmother sees all the wonders
that are going to be coming into the kitchen
and is convinced that the old way of life was nothing
compared to what's going to happen.
It’s a paradise.
No one who hasn’t cooked over a woodstove by the light of a kerosene lamp
can really appreciate what it all means.
Everybody’s going to have robots wash the dishes.
And, the good life in on his way. Just wait.
The contest is over in exactly 7 minutes and 58 seconds.
In that time Mrs modern has washed 50 dishes and 40 pieces of silverware.
It’s all over Mrs. You may as well rest now.
And so Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the winner:
Missus Modern.
And it's all about how in the process of going through
the fun of the new industrial future,
the kid abandons his anti-capitalist values and becomes a sort of
you know, a drum major for the business system.
Do you honestly believe that industry can make enough jobs
in the future for the young people that are coming along?
I think the problem is going to be the other way around.
Industry will make so many jobs, there won’t be enough people to fill them.
It’s left people without a vision of democracy
without a vision of capitalist democracy
Omnipresent and effective,
these PR campaigns nonetheless raised a number of questions.
Some people openly denounced the manipulation of minds through PR;
an accusation sometimes pointed directly at Edward Bernays.
Modern science gives our opinion leaders
weapons of mass impression which can slay our mind.
The responsibility for avoiding such disaster
rest on the shoulders of those who now undertake opinion leadership.
Freedom of propaganda is as important to our democracy
as are other civil liberties.
Freedom of religion, press, speech…
The usefulness of propaganda makes it a vital asset to the democracy.
Most people would have been outraged at that kind of a charge
and taken real offense.
Eddie Bernays liked it.
It was something suggesting he had real power
in reshaping the way people thought
and Eddie Bernays thought that wasn’t the bad thing.
He thought also and he deceived himself in lots of ways
by thinking that what he was doing was generally for the public good.
Part of this system is a competitive battle,
and part of that competitive battle is competing propaganda,
competing advertising, competing for markets in the market place
that is based on a free and open competition.
It's not free competition it's a paid for competition
and in that paid for competition, the people with the most resources,
the corporations, sometimes government, win in every circumstance.
They win in the sense that they have the most resources.
Doesn't mean they win in terms of outcomes but they have the most advantages
going into that struggle.
And the ordinary person wanting to make their own propaganda
is free competition is systematically outgunned and outpaid for
by the big people.
Okay Bernays…
I-I happened to be a technician on propaganda
and I’m not a person who can solve your difficulties
as to which ideology you prefer or don’t prefer.
The United States' entry into World War 2 in 1941
suspended the debate on public relations.
In fact, there was a nationwide return to mass propaganda to support the war effort,
employing the exact same techniques invented by the Creel Commission
20 years earlier.
Bernays advised the US government on how to use public relations and propaganda,
but he never played quite the central role that he did during World War I.
In part because public relations and propaganda
were much better understood by then,
and the government had its own propaganda agencies.
As for major industrial companies,
they saw the war as a wonderful PR tool
for re-launching their campaign on the American way of life.
The advertisements are filled with pictures
of what we will come home to after the war.
Sometimes it’s in a crystal ball,
which is a tool for seeing the future,
and it’s a future which is filled with the bounty and abundance,
and commodification of your future as soon as we have gotten rid of this war.
Immediately after the Second World War,
the business world launched an enormous offensive
to try to beat back the progressive elements of the New deal.
The offensive, backed by the PR industry and Edward Bernays himself,
was justified by the resurfacing of workers' demands after the war.
In 1945 and 1946,
almost 10 million workers took to the streets,
paralyzing a large part of the country.
In reaction to this,
leading industrialists used their influence to have the new president, Harry Truman,
push through a law restricting the powers of the unions and the right to strike.
Then they called on PR agencies to paint protestors as citizens
who were against true American values.
And in the 1950s, there were enormous efforts,
it’s pretty well studied incidentally
to try to take over schools, universities, sports leagues, churches,
factories were forced sessions to teach people what’s called Americanism, harmony,
get the bad guys, anti-Communism was, of course, used for this purpose.
Communism controls 1/3 of the world area.
What are the facts behind the faces?
The whole United States was afraid of nuclear war.
I remember getting under the desk in school, we had to do that.
Tony knows a bomb can explode anytime of the year,
day or night.
He’s ready for it.
Duck and cover!
American society was overcome with acute paranoia.
People lived in fear of the Russians invading the country
or sparking a nuclear war.
Duck and cover!
This national climate of distress and fear
was used directly by PR experts to defend strictly private interests.
In the early 1950s,
it was a small peaceful country which would embody, on its own,
the communist enemy that needed to be shot down.
On March 15th 1951,
Jacobo Arbenz was democratically elected President of Guatemala.
One of his first decisions was to nationalize - in return for compensation
- the country’s uncultivated land
and to redistribute it to the poor peasants.
But three-quarters of this land
belonged to one of the largest multinationals in the United States,
the United Fruit Company.
I'm Chiquita banana and I've come to say
Bananas have to ripen in a certain way
When they are fleck'd with brown and have a golden hue
Bananas taste the best and are best for you.
For the United Fruit Company,
President Arbenz' agrarian reform
posed a serious threat to its interests.
A media-based counter-attack was deemed necessary
and it was entrusted to one of the company's main advisers: Edward Bernays
Eddie Bernays, on behalf of United Fruit Company,
managed to convince much of America
and a big enough part of Guatemalans
that the leftist government which was coming in and trying to reform
archaic economic systems there that that was a beachhead for the Soviet Union.
And what Eddie Bernays did was waged a campaign of psychological warfare
that was even more profound and much more effective
than the one he had waged on behalf of the US government during World War I.
Edward Bernays would define his propaganda campaign
with a term borrowed from World War One: the Media Blitz.
A media blitz generally means that you're going to be
on the phone constantly with different reporters
who are influential
and you were providing copy to them on a very regular basis.
By creating his own news bureau
and wire service just to talk about Guatemala.
Although the press office set up by Edward Bernays
was officially considered to be independent,
it was in reality financed by the United Fruit Company.
It spoon-fed the press the major part of its information
on the supposed communist leanings of Guatemala.
Edward Bernays organized free trips for reporters to visit the country.
That was effective in the reporters carrying the stories.
A number of journalists who were involved with this told me decades later
that they realized after the fact,
unfortunately most of them not at the time,
that they were being used and manipulated by Eddie Bernays
on behalf of the United Fruit Company.
And none of that was apparent to them at the time.
Gautemala falls under a communist dominated regime.
Following a reign of terror,
manipulated by such communists as the Argentinian Che Guevara
who later goes to Cuba,
the common people of this tiny nation rise up….
Eddie Bernays convincingly made that part of
this fear of the Soviets and fear of encroaching communism
in a way that I don't think it really was
and in a way that helped convince the US government
that it had to step in and do something in Guatemala.
On June 18th 1954,
President Arbenz was overthrown by the rebel forces of Castillo Armas
with the decisive backing of the CIA.
His arrival in power marked the beginning of a civil war which would last 40 years
and leave up to 150,000 people dead or missing.
We know you like bananas
Edward Bernays' propaganda campaign lasted 3 years.
He helped undermine
the legitimacy of the duly elective this government
and this was dangerous not because of what it did only in Guatemala,
but it set a pattern for the United States
convincing us that it was okay and that we could actually achieve success
in a way that helped dictate American policy, failed policy in Cuba
where we thought we could do the same thing to the Castro regime
and years later in Vietnam,
where we thought we could do the same thing
in imposing a government that was friendly to us in South Vietnam.
One year after the Guatemalan coup d'état,
Edward Bernays published Engineering of Consent,
a theoretical and practical guide to public relations
aimed at the new generation.
In 40 years,
Edward Bernays succeeded in turning a concept of people governance
into a reality firmly rooted in all spheres of society.
In 1990, five years before his death,
Life magazine named Edward Bernays
as one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.
I don’t think my father ever willingly told a lie.
Maybe he did,
but the truth is made up
of a whole lot of different elements, and you can’t separate one out.
When you have people
who view their role,
as Bernays put it,
as being an engineer of consent,
then democracy becomes a sham.
That's not just a question of arguments and winning hearts and minds,
it's about changing society, that's what propaganda was about originally
and that's what Public Relations is about now.
It’s about enforcing
a particular set of agendas and interests by those who use it.
And those who use it overwhelmingly
are powerful interest in society predominantly
but also government.
What are the goals that we serve? Are we working for a client?
And if that client is not the people,
the population at large,
then we have a problem, because that means that private interests,
or small numbers of people,
are shaping public fictions
and investing them with a sense of private urgency,
which allows them to fuck with our heads.