Exposing the Harmful Nature of the Media

In 1914 Thomas Edison, American’s most famous inventor, made a public service announcement  warning people about the hazards of cigarette smoking. It seems that the harmful health effects cigarettes where noticed as far back as the early 1600′s.  Henry Ford, the auto maker, was so convinced that he refused to hire anybody who smoked.  Smoking was getting some very bad high level PR and rightfully so. Edison was only telling the truth.

There are, however, some people who care more about profit even if it comes at the expense of someone elses health or life.  Edison and Ford were no match, however, for the financial titans and the coming age of mass media propaganda campaigns or the promotion of misleading, inaccurate or false information coupled with the intent of influencing public opinion and behavior. In 1928 Edward Louis Bernays burst onto the American scene with his brazenly entitled book–Propaganda.

[From Visualpedia.com] Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 – March 9, 1995) is considered one of the fathers of the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious.

[An excerpt from The Century of Self ] In 2002, Adam Curtis and the BBC released a four-part series called “The Century of the Self.”

The series tracks how American elites have aggressively used the modern behavioral sciences to persuade, coerce and manipulate the American public into accepting the corporate-government world’s version of events as their own.

This seven-minute video which I call “The Assassin of Democracy” focuses on one of the most skillful and amoral expert of all the experts in mass manipulation, Edward Bernays. Bernays got his first taste of the power of propaganda during World War I. He advised US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Eisenhower and served numerous corporations and business associations. One of his biggest fans was Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, a fact about which Bernays bragged proudly.

In this clip, we see a pattern that Bernays used over and over again: turn a harmless entity into a fearsome enemy through lies and manufactured news items. Then use the “threat” to justify attack. The subject of this video is Bernays campaign against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1953, but you’ll have no trouble seeing that this very same method is being used today.

Edward L. Bernays Father of Modern Day Public Manipulation Strategies

Is it really any wonder why the world is in such a predicament?  What haven’t they (government & corporations-GORP) tried to shove down our throats?  We have hundred of channels peddling “entertainment” all splattered with thousands of products we don’t need and many even dangerous to our well being.

Doctors Selling Cigarettes

We are an over-spent, over-weight nation thanks to the modern miracle of TV broadcasting coupled with a sophisticated knowledge of human behavior and ruthless leadership class who is all too willing to injure and exploit for their own gain.

Cigarettes are Good for you according to a study done in the 1950′s