Media Control by Noam Chomsky, 2002, Excerpts
Walter Lippmann was the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy. Lippmann argued that in a properly functioning democracy there are classes of citizens. There is first of all the class of citizens who take an active role in running general affairs. That’s the specialized class. They carry out the executive function; they do the thinking and planning and understand the common interests. They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic, and ideological systems. That’s a small percentage of the population.
Those others are what Lippmann called “the bewildered herd.” Their function in a democracy, he said, is to be “spectators,” not participants in action. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. That’s called an election. But once they’ve lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class they’re supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants.
The compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things. “The common interests elude public opinion entirely” and can only be understood and managed by a “specialized class of “responsible men” who are smart enough to figure things out.
We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things. So we need something to tame the bewildered herd, and that something is this new revolution in the art of democracy, the “manufacture of consent”.
So we have one kind of educational system directed to the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. The bewildered herd basically just has to be distracted.
The people with real power are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can serve the owners’ interests, then they’ll be part of the executive group. State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.
Father of Spin, Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relationsby Larry Tye, 1998
Germans and Public Relations
While scholars still debate the extent to which the Nazis used Bernay’s works, Goebbels did employ techniques nearly identical to those used by Bernays – skillfully exploiting symbols by making Jews into scapegoats and Hitler into the embodiment of righteousness; manipulating the media by trumpeting Nazi triumphs on the battlefield and hiding their extermination campaigns; and vesting unheard-of power in state propaganda just as Bernays had advised in Crystallizing.
“His methods are largely identical with those portrayed in Chapters VI and XI of Mein Kampf.”
Managing the Herd
People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They’re not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators and enter the political arena. That’s really threatening.
They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the message, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that rich middle class family you’re watching and to have nice values like harmony and Americanism. Every once in awhile you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like “support our troops.”
You've got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them.
The media is a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn’t even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They’re marginalized and properly distracted. The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience and passivity that is their proper state.
