Public Relations, or PR, is part of modern life most of us don’t think about too much anymore. We’re used to ads obnoxiously popping up on our social media, YouTube, and in our inboxes. We’ve also become more aware of something called microtargeting, which corporations (and others) use to tailor ad campaigns and messaging to groups of people that share similar characteristics like gender, age, and lifestyle. And after a few times of purchasing products that don’t live up to the hype, many of us have become more skeptical that the next fad will actually make us thinner, healthier, or happier.
Since we’re able to see more of the PR man behind the curtain, and government regulations somewhat manage the claims advertisers can make, it’s not that big of a deal, right? What is more, sometimes we actually do end up the liking products they’re selling. But the problem is not that Dove is selling us better soap and Apple is selling us another smartphone, but that politicians and the media are trying to sell us a democratic government of their own making.
In order to understand how American politicians and their lap dog media accomplices use PR to control those they govern it is important to rewind the tape back to the early 20th century. Back then, psychologists like Edwards Bernays developed the concept of propaganda, which he defined as fashioning and projecting “credible renditions of reality.” Now if you think that using propaganda and PR interchangeably isn’t appropriate, Bernays and others actually admitted to replacing the term propaganda with PR because 20th century authoritarian regimes (think Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, etc.) tainted the term propaganda.
These early PR practitioners believed that a more politically empowered public with more access to information posed a problem to American democracy, and the solution was to “engineer consent” of the governed. As we know, democratic governments like America rely on the consent of the governed, which is most typically expressed through voting and public support or opposition to policies and political stances. Elites like Bernays recognized that while it was important to give the people the outward trappings of democracy, he believed that the people were simply unfit to vote and form reasonable political opinions if left to their own devices. That’s where the concept of “engineering consent” came in.
“Engineering consent” relies on creating circumstances that link to selected emotional images that engage target audiences for specific ends. In other words, the elite design a PR campaign to guide the public towards the positions the elite prefer, and then the elite support these positions publicly as if they were responding to the will of the people.
As one would expect, the media became a critical avenue for “engineering consent.’ Bernays remarked that “News is not an inanimate thing…It is the overt act that makes news, and news in turn shapes the attitudes and actions of people.” PR specialists perfected the art of crafting newsworthy events and shaping the ways in which the media reported on what these spin doctors created.
So, did it work? Well, let’s just say that President Wilson enlisted Ivy Lee, George Creel, and others to mount a PR campaign to persuade the public to enter World War I even after Wilson campaigned on an isolationist platform. WWI was sold to the American public as necessary to “make the world safe for democracy,” through slogans, images depicting the enemy as subhuman, and the support of local “Four Minute Men.” To top it all off, Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918 that criminalized any criticism of the war effort.
Obviously, things have changed over the past century. Unlike our predecessors, we have access to an over-abundance of information we can access through our smartphones, more Americans have post-high school education, and a fragmented, decentralized media landscape that makes broadcasting a single message almost impossible. Unfortunately, these factors aren’t enough to inoculate us against the effects of a state-sponsored PR campaign. Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston make a compelling case for the media’s inability to be the consistent and effective government watchdog in their book, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (2007).
In some cases, the media is more than a subtly manipulated co-conspirator. During Operation Mockingbird, a CIA operation during the height of the Cold War, the federal government not only spied on newsmen to uncover their contacts, but also bribed and coerced journalists into promoting pro-government propaganda.
Now, of course, this is not to say that the public cannot form opinions and positions apart from politicians and the media. Nor does this mean that all media outlets are untrustworthy. This does mean that we should be far more skeptical about what the government and media are telling us. And if it looks, walks, and talks like a PR campaign, chances are it is.
So, what are the elites trying to sell us these days? Well, to start, we all walked around with face masks for about a year and a half even though Fauci and others knew masks wouldn’t make a difference, among other things. When credible doctors and scientists speak against lockdowns and vaccines and for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin they are censored. Some have even been fired. Don’t take my word for it. Go on duckduckgo.com and search “Fauci’s emails” and “Great Barrington Declaration” as a start.
If we weren’t experiencing a near totalizing PR campaign, why wouldn’t we have an open, honest debate about these and other over-politicized topics? Why are those who raise questions or concerns in good faith delegitimized, demonized, and demonetized? And why is the Biden Administration now trying to partner with SMS carriers to eliminate what the administration deems to be misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines in our private social media and text messages?
It’s because peddlers of PR need to discredit competing messages. And those who “engineer consent” need you to buy into their PR campaign hook, line, and sinker.
I’m not going to tell you what you have to think about the lockdown, vaccines, and therapeutics because I’m not that kind of doctor. But I do have a doctorate in political science, so I can tell you with confidence that most of us are not getting the full story. Instead we’re getting managed by elites that don’t think we can’t handle the truth.
It’s worth considering what those pushing this new PR campaign stand to gain and what we stand to lose.
Photo: "Step into your place. 1915" by kitchener.lord is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/5b460cd7-06ce-46ef-ac31-5ac0497cef4b
Sources:
PR! A Social History of Spin. Stuart Ewen, 1996
http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Fall07/28/Engineering_of_consent.pdf
Definition of “engineering consent” from Dr. Lance Bennett of the University of Washington
https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/operationmockingbirdCIA.pdfhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/10/14/how-the-cia-paid-and-threatened-journalists-to-do-its-workhttps://listverse.com/2013/05/25/10-dirty-secret-cia-operations/