Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Mr. Creel assembled machinery which included a Division of News that issued more than 6000 releases, had to enlist 75,000 Four Minute Men who delivered at least 750,000 speeches to an aggregate of over 300,000,000 people. Boy scouts delivered annotated copies of President Wilson’s addresses to the householders of America. Periodicals were sent to 600,000 teachers. 200,000 lantern slides were furnished for illustrated lectures. 1,500 different designs were turned out for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals, and buttons. The chambers of commerce, the churches, fraternal societies, schools, were used as channels of distribution. This was the largest and the most intensive effort to carry quickly a fairly uniform set of ideas to all the people of a nation.

Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002, Excerpts

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform “Peace Without Victory.” That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. There was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, such as Belgian babies with their arms torn off.

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998

Gulf War I

The selling of America on the Persian Gulf War was a public relations triumph. Its leading man, Saddam Hussein, was cast as pure villain complete with menacing leer and malevolent mustache. It had Iraqi soldiers snatching infants from hospital incubators and leaving them on the floor to die while Iraqi helicopters hovered over Kuwait City and Iraqi tanks rolled down the streets.

One detail was left out of that version of the war, however: the fact that it was crafted by one of America’s biggest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, in a campaign bought and paid for by rich Kuwaitis who were Saddam’s archenemies.

Hill and Knowton: ‘We put in place whatever is needed to help get the end result.’

Hill and Knowlton’s war against Iraq was hardly a PR first. Forty years earlier Bernays had designed an almost identical campaign in Guatemala, one where Guatemala’s socialist leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was demonized much like Hussein and where the U.S. public was made to believe it was fighting against tyranny.

That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. After WWII, the same techniques were used whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of press and freedom of political thought. There was strong support from the media and from the business establishment.

Pentagon and Bogus News

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE6DC143DF936A35751C1A9659C8B63

December 5, 2003

Early last year Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad.

But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Department could design an ''effective strategic influence'' campaign to combat global terror, according to an internal Pentagon document.

The Pentagon Clears Itself of Illegal Acts

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=131435

Octorber 23, 2006

According to a brief summary of the investigation released by the Inspector General's office, "Psychological operations are planned to convey selected, truthful information to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to U.S. objectives."

Pentagon Iraqi propaganda program contracted to the Lincoln Group (which calls itself "a strategic communications & pubic relations firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments")