Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002
One conception of democracy is that the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.
In a totalitarian state, or a military state, you just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
It’s also necessary to completely falsify history.
Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts
Political bodies set armies in motion or make peace, conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another, facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim “policies,” and “destiny,” raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against another.
Representative government cannot be worked successfully unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. Public opinion must be organized for the press, not by the press. The art of inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is practiced in every political campaign.
A concrete choice has to be presented, the choice has to be connected, by the transfer of interest through the symbols. The professional politicians learned this long before democratic philosophers.
Without some form of censorship, propaganda is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.
The General Staff of an army in the field can control what the public will perceive. It controls the selection of correspondents who go to the front, controls their movements at the front, reads and censors their messages from the front, and operates the wires. The Government behind the army by its command of cables and passports, mails and custom houses and blockades increases the control.
