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it's been estimated that an average American living in cities sees up to 4,000 ads a day ads are everywhere you look subways bus stops billboards magazines this toxic culture of mindless consumption exploits our innermost insecurities and desires to meet possible standards the corporate PR machine is enormous ly successful due to a model created by a man named Edward Bernays nearly a century ago the nephew of Sigmund Freud Bernays is considered the father of modern propaganda or public relations an Austrian aristocrat Bernays is first contribution to the United States was helping President Woodrow Wilson sell the idea of World War 1 as a noble mission to spread democracy in Europe in order to create the engineering of consent Bernays argued you must appeal to the unconscious mind and on behalf of numerous corporate clients Bernays helped perfect the tools of manipulation and conditioning that are used today to understand more about the history of propaganda and the collusion between the US Empire and for the state I talked to Professor of Media Studies at New York University mark Crispin Miller who wrote the intro to the new edition of Bernays 1928 seminal book propaganda when did public opinion began to stand out as a force to be managed by the establishment for all intents and purposes I think it's probably a most accurate to say that World War one marked an important turning point in the rise of what we call public opinion as a consideration for political leaders and the the science of propaganda which was used and has been used with increasing sophistication to move public opinion in certain directions basically to make sure that we don't succumb to anything like real democracy you know I mean public opinion has to be respected but not out of any respect for the popular will it has to be respected as a kind of mighty beast that needs to be tamed unless democracy break out and upset the applecart in the introduction he wrote a Bearnaise book propaganda you said his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now but it transformed the buyers very world so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship talk about how this strategy has been institutionalized what Bernays understood brilliantly was was the need to kind of shape the flow of events to influence the media in a general way to create an atmosphere in which large numbers of people would end up making certain choices coming to certain conclusions without really being aware of any stimulus you see so he had a lot of contempt for advertising because it was too explicit it was too blatant to say it was saying by this I mean it wasn't quite as simplistic as he made it sound he bad mouthed advertising and disdained it in favor of his own method it was to kind of create the climate in which people would do certain things to benefit his clients my favorite example is that you know he he represented a piano company how to get people to buy pianos well he did this by creating a craze for music rooms in homes right he actually contacted people in the architectural magazines and so on in the news media people who wrote about life style and so on didn't use that term then in order to create a kind of trend for music rooms okay well you have a music room what are you going to put in it I mean obviously most you know middle and upper-middle class people want to buy pianos you see so even though he never mentioned the name of the piano company and didn't even harp on pianos per se in the propaganda it had the the general net effect of an getting people to buy more pianos so the client was happy he had you know a contract to help increase sales for American Tobacco and one of the most important things that he did to that end was to get Hollywood to incorporate cigarette-smoking much more consciously and often artfully into the scenarios of movies you know to get them to write cigarette smoking lighting up and so on to write all that into the stories you see so it developed a kind of you know grammar of you know seduction and you know you could express various kinds of emotions with cigarettes depending on you know who lit you up or whatever but the point I'm trying to make is that he understood that the in explicit a kind of in explicit influence you know just creating a large-scale shift in the weather you know to get people to do certain things that was his great his great insight you see and now you ask how did that how did that come to define our world basically well let me answer that question by stepping back to say that I think that we live at a moment when propaganda has never been so pervasive has never been so influential has never been so dangerous and I mean propaganda I know that the word sounds terribly quaint I say propaganda people think of you know Chinese voices coming squawking over loudspeakers in Beijing or they think of Soviet posters right or Nazi propaganda they think of Leni Riefenstahl actually propaganda is not a totalitarian phenomenon primarily although we we have long since learned to think that it is right propaganda is as American as apple pie propaganda at its most sophisticated was perfected and I mean not just political propaganda but commercial propaganda both kinds of propaganda were perfected jointly by the United States and Britain you know in mine Kampf Hitler and his famous chapter on war propaganda talks about how deeply he admired what a brilliant job the British propagandists had done in World War one had nothing but contempt for the German propaganda and and you know resolved to make sure that his own and the Nazi party's propaganda would be brilliant in imitation of the British you see so you know how many people does the world of propaganda employ in the United States you think about it I mean it isn't only people in public relations it's also people in advertising agencies it's also people in the world of so-called public diplomacy it's also people in the world of what we call lobbying there are countless euphemisms that we use today for propaganda right if you go up to a person in an ad agency or a PR specialist and say well how's the propaganda going you know they're going to be insulted they're going to feel like you've you've called them a dirty name they don't understand that they do propaganda right they do propaganda and the rise of all those euphemisms for it is a direct result of the successful effort to cast propaganda as something that they do in those closed societies the Russians do it the Chinese do it the Iranians do it the Venezuelans do it the Cubans do it we don't do it we educate people we provide them with information and that misrepresentation of propaganda has had the paradoxical effect of making it extraordinarily effective see because propaganda works best when you don't see it for what it is the level of sophistication is completely unreal and it's not just people being aware of the propaganda and commercialism coming at them tens of thousands of the advertisements every day and being able to tune them out emits things beyond that the implants within the propaganda talked about that the layers that's a good point I mean first of all I want to say people tend to pride themselves on not falling for propaganda people say you know commercials don't work on me and I can see through them and there are there are a number of ad campaign that have successfully appealed to that idea you know the kind of winking ironic advertising it and you share a little a little chuckle or a little smirk over the fact that you're too smart to fall for this right this is kind of a postmodern move that advertising makes well it's been making it in various ways really since the 30s okay people don't understand that even if they consciously scorn a particular ad is cheesy or they tell themselves they don't really believe the claims that has nothing to do with what they'll end up buying if they happen to get thirsty and they go into a store somewhere but you know let's let's move away from the world of what they call white propaganda which is to say propaganda that announces itself as propaganda that's TV commercials political speeches stuff like that you know and let's move into the world of what we call grey propaganda which is propaganda that disguises itself as journalism or you know any number of dodges and disguises that propaganda puts on write product placement movies is a form of great propaganda you know and then a movie like Argo for example or zero dark thirty to move to more sinister examples are movies that have a kind of geopolitical agenda that are you know making a case for very powerful interests within the state movies that the CIA has actually helped the producers make you know and let's talk about what's behind the propaganda Bernays is quoted as saying we are governed our minds are molded our tastes formed our ideas suggested largely by men we've never heard of who are the invisible governor's that are controlling these ideas yeah well it's important to note that Bernays didn't think of that as a bad thing yeah heroically yeah he thought that was a good thing because his assumption was that these agust figures these mighty figures in the world's business and politics and the media were essentially benign he actually believed that there was a kind of rationality operating up top you know which you know as I point out my own introduction to the new edition of propaganda is a groundless claim because often people who devote themselves to propaganda end up believing it themselves you know if you have a vested interest in a particular version of the truth you're going to believe it