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How Media and Advertising Breed Americans to Be Eternally Childlike Consumers
By Gustav Wynn (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)
Bernays also brought us the idea of the 'publicity stunt', such as the famous 1928 event in which women were enlisted to light up cigarettes in the NYC Easter parade. The papers were told they were suffragettes, openly defying the societal ban on female smoking in public, lighting "torches of freedom" a la the proud Statue of Liberty. This ran on front pages everywhere, but in reality the girls were secretly hired by Bernays on behalf of his client American Tobacco, whose sales doubled, rising $28 million that year alone. Hijacking Freudian theory, Bernays smugly commented that women everywhere began to smoke because they wanted a surrogate "penis" of their own.
Bernays was key to the development of "consumerism" itself as a lifestyle, convincing Americans to buy things they don't need by conning them using more of Freud's insights into the subconscious. Lehman Bros. and others bankrolled the development of huge "department" stores, using Bernaysian techniques to persuade people to purchase a host of products that they never would have thought to otherwise buy. Shopping became recreation rather then a chore as Bernays perfected the concepts of product placement, the celebrity endorsement, and the more insidious pseudo-scientific product endorsement. The public responded exactly as predicted -- the wasteful overspending on a mass scale directly contributing to the crash of 1929.
Bernays became so powerful he actually came to control his uncle Sigmund's publishing rights, leaving the genius to struggle in war torn Vienna with just enough to get by. Unfortunately, Bernays published many books of his own, including "Crystallizing Public Opinion" in 1923 and "Propaganda" in 1928 (yes, the original "Propaganda") which Joseph Goebbels as the Nazi propaganda minister made abundant use of throughout the Holocaust, often directly crediting Bernays.
Bernays also convinced your grandmother to use Betty Crocker cake mix. After sales of it's new instant cake powder slumped, Bernays suggested adding an egg to the ingredient list on the back panel. Though completely unnecessary, this made sales soar because housewives did not feel as guilty about using a shortcut if they were including their own egg, though it was purely symbolic.
Bernays was behind the scenes on many major acts of mass manipulation in the U.S. for decades, both commercially and politically. He was hired to improve various' presidents approval ratings, but he also taught our government how to stage and sell wars. The term "banana republic" originated when United Fruit's payoffs to corrupt leaders in Central America couldn't contain rising citizen revolts. The company brutally exploited the laborer underclass in order to sell bananas super cheap to U.S. markets, but when Guatemala's new reform government tried to enforce human rights guidelines, Bernays was brought in. Company operatives staged attacks and fed "exclusive" misinformation to the media in order to foment public and political sentiment against these "savage commies". Suddenly a brutal coup took place, (coincidentally by well-equipped forces friendly to United Fruit) and they restored "order", annihilating, torturing and displacing hundreds of thousands of impoverished workers and indigenous Mayan peoples.
This method would repeat itself following the incredible build up of the military industrial complex, despite President Eisenhower's clear warning that for-profit commercial forces were infiltrating the political decision making processes of the government and military and that the public needed to be vigilant, aware and "stand guard" (wink, wink).
We now know the report of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to start the escalation in Vietnam was false, but the administration ignored the subsequent retraction once they had the provocation that they wanted. Within days Congress granted LBJ a "blank check". In Senate hearings, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was asked if we were truly provoked, he said "Our Navy played no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any." Of course there were no South Vietnamese actions, the provocations were entirely American! Now in his 80s, McNamara admitted his manipulation technique in a documentary: "I learned early on ... never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule."
The intel leading up to the Iraq war was similarly fudged. Cheney's office fed disgraced reporter Judith Miller lies about WMD factories and after the NY Times ran the story on the front page, the national media followed along. A simple, time-tested Bernaysian tactic of popular opinion "bandwagon jumping" after a "media plant". This was confirmed later when Colin Powell's longtime Chief of Staff Col. Wilkerson exposed on PBS that he and Powell had perpetrated a hoax on the American people due to pressure from Cheney, and that Powell doubted the evidence the whole way, stifling his own better judgment and pissing away his credibility forever on the gamble that WMD would eventually be found to make his lies moot. On the same PBS program, Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix personally stated that Cheney warned him just outside the Oval Office to support the President's findings or he would be "discredited". Unfortunately, we couldn't withdraw from Iraq after learning the evidence had been manipulated and owe our current troubles to this duplicity.
Though many doubted justification for an Iraqi invasion from the start, suspicious of war hawks' ties to defense industry donors and the enormous potential for profiteering, polls proved that the trusting American public, including Congress fell for the hoax and it took months and years to unravel the truth when a cornered George W. Bush famously blustered "mistakes were made". Make no mistake, manipulations were made. Even if we ignored the pre-invasion protest marches worldwide and dozens of world leaders including U.N. Security Council members doubting the strength of Bush's evidence, the fact that all-points information control tactics were in place should have been a clear tipoff to any enlightened student of history.
Besides the usual in-country propaganda campaigns via coalition-backed newspapers and radio broadcasts, back home we saw a more modern manipulation in the ridiculous notion of the "embedded" reporter, that is a "news" correspondent traveling and bunking with one side of an armed conflict purporting to tell the full story objectively.
But perhaps the strongest vehicle assisting Bush's war never-ending pro-war media campaign is the for-profit talk radio industry, led by nationally syndicated hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Completely one-sided and in lock step with war-pimping, capitalist and imperialist ideology, these highly successful hosts, including the improbably rich Limbaugh have garnered incredible ratings and revenues by remaining steadfastly in the neo-con corner, transforming many listeners into agents for dispensation of their talking points. Though neither Hannity nor Limbaugh allows equal time for well-articulated dissenting views on their air, many listeners take their long-winded soliloquies as credible and meaningful. A more discerning look shows this is due to their skillful control of their audiences, using subtle Bernaysian and Pavlovian methods, they encourage deep loyalty as they foster emotional investment and eventual attachment in their listeners by spinning the news of the day in ways that project an inclusive moral superiority and familial warmth.
Though they have scores of imitators, and even left wing counterparts, these top-rated radio giants are at the peak because they radiate their innate homespun charisma in ways that masterfully cloak incomplete and often irrational arguments with a well honed delivery and natural oratory confidence. Hannity's call screeners are far more permissive then Limbaugh's, though I've heard him reply to straightforward, specific questions about how he believes the Iraq war will be won with Bush-like vagaries, such as "the winds of freedom will blow". Would either host allow a sampling of calls representative of the actual population however, there would be about 70-75% anti-war calls, so they are indeed a testament to a firmly-committed propaganda mission, as shills for the Republican party energizing those less likely to ask questions.
If not for surveys and polls, we might not realize how many Americans detest Bush's policy decisions. But it was directly in response to the same type of Bernaysian tactics, Cold War-era abuse of power and affronts to civil liberties that prompted Gallup, Roper and other pollsters to refine their scientific and statistical sampling methods, yielding much greater accuracy and effectiveness in reassuring the population that despite what we are told, there is little need to reshape our entire lives out of unfounded paranoia or hysteria.
What we need desperately today is to teach every kid in school how to recognize and deconstruct media manipulation. Almost every ad we see today includes a false promise or exaggeration of some type. There are grievous conflicts-of-interest in a media that uses its news division to promote it's movie arm, which ties in to its music division and merchandising operation. So too are the complex webs of media, political and corporate interconnectedness which affect our every consideration. For example, the six o'clock network news is dominated by pharmaceutical ads in most markets today. Can we trust they'd be reporting on studies involving these drugs? Of course not. Indeed, just the opposite, many food and drug firms set up shell "advocacy" operations that publish studies in praise of their drugs. These ties are not disclosed.
Based on the gullibility of the current adult generation, I'd say our kids need to be better equipped to find more reliable sources of information and be better taught how to process it. Product placement has progressed far beyond Michael J. Fox drinking a Pepsi in a movie - today, toy companies produce entire animated TV series' and lease an entire season of time from networks to publicize their characters. The Hallmark channel has struck deals with American Girl dolls to air programs "imbedding" their products and you can wonder what subliminal cues may lie in such programs, directed at impressionable young girls, some practically babies. Disney has your kids locked up from cradle to grave, with the biggest kids movies, TV and radio stations, magazine and book divisions, retail stores, theme parks, you name it. But McDonalds is particularly heinous, with campaigns such as "her first fry", encouraging careless parents to feed unhealthy fast food to small children, who quickly come to associate McDonalds with prizes and playhouses, specifically designed to lure your kids back again and again.
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