The Economist on the early history of public relations:
“[Edward] Bernays’s greatest opportunity came with the outbreak of the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson realised the government needed to bring on board the many doubters who saw it as a capitalists’ war that their country should shun. Bernays and other leading PR men were recruited to a new Committee on Public Information (CPI), a vast propaganda operation. They were to put into practice one of Bernays’s main findings from the studies of mass psychology by Uncle Sigmund and others: that the public’s first impulse is usually to follow a trusted leader rather than consider the facts for itself.
In small towns across the country the CPI recruited bank managers and other local authority-figures as “four-minute men”. They gave brief, supposedly impromptu, speeches in cinemas and other public places. Many made the bogus claims that antiwar sentiment was being fomented by German agents, and that America risked being overrun by Prussians.
So successful was the CPI in shaping public opinion that it encouraged the early PR men, Bernays especially, to puff themselves up to new heights of grandeur. No longer would they be mere lackeys of the robber barons; they were now the Great Manipulators, shapers of public opinion for the public’s own good. (…)
All sorts of outfits have discovered the power of persuasion. Charities, trade unions, protest groups and other anti-corporate organisations create stunts and “facts” as powerful, and sometimes as dubious, as those staged by Bernays’s minions. A masterful recent example is a Greenpeace video in which an office worker opens a KitKat and finds an orangutan’s finger inside—the intention being to press Nestlé, the chocolate bar’s maker, to stop buying palm oil from places where the ape’s native forests are being cut down. Such anti-corporate PR often goes curiously unnoticed by historians of the industry, but it is at least as manipulative as what companies get up to.”
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Just a quick Q … aren’t there a h_ll of a lot more east-Asian forests being cut down to grow palm oil for Europe’s bogus “green energy” mandates, than are being cut down for Kit Kat bars? I believe it is the Euro version of North America’s ethanol scam.
I know that Nestle is considered to be the root of (almost) all evil by the leftie crowd ever since the days when their baby formula was boycotted for allegedly being marketed to African women as a superior substitute for breast milk … but claiming that chocolate bars are responsible for loss of forest habitat strikes me as pure baloney.
Perhaps the ad is actually a sophisticated judo-move type of propaganda, intended to acknowledge loss of Orangutan habitat but shift people’s attention away from the criminal socialist governments of Europe and onto an already-blackened capitalist entity.
More specifically, who cares? You want apes, then buy some and take care of them.
Oh, wait, the government MADE THAT ILLEGAL!
a must-see on edward bernays is the century of the self:
http://is.gd/jWnEn
interestingly, bernays’ brother, murray, played a very prominent part in the nuremburg war trials, a defining event in shaping post-wwII history.
What did his brother do?
I know that there was some shams during the Nuremburg trials but not the specifics of it.
novel legal techniques like using “film as witness” – essentially spin – make it difficult not to think about edward’s groundbreaking techniques. but it was murray who was responsible for the particular design of the trials.
http://is.gd/jZ0qJ
those interested may like to read edward bernays’ 1928 classic, propaganda.
http://is.gd/jZslm
there are some great and timeless lines in the abovementioned work:
“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
Great find, as always, newson.
Some background on Bernays’ role in Nuremburg:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html
Interesting to note Bernays’ reliance on Lemkin’s work:
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/trials1.html
Lemkin was of course the subject of a book by the heroic James Martin (The Man Who Invented Genocide, which is not about holocaust revisionism but the politicization of war time atrocities by the victors).
jeff gates shows the tradition of substitution of facts for feelings to further a war agenda didn’t stop at wwI:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a11fqNChw&NR=1
I have the book
Manipulators is one way of describing them. Another is ‘propagandists.’
“They gave brief, supposedly impromptu, speeches in cinemas and other public places. Many made the bogus claims that antiwar sentiment was being fomented by German agents, and that America risked being overrun by Prussians.”
I think I’d claim that America was already overrun by the Prussians by that time.
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