Public Opinion Series

Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928, Excerpts

Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it.

Propaganda exists on all sides of us, and it changes our mental pictures of the world. Its use is growing as its efficiency in gaining public support is recognized. It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even the mass mind alone, but also the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.

The public is made up of interlocking groups – economic, social, religious, educational, cultural, racial, collegiate, local, sports, and hundreds of others. The whole basis of successful propaganda is to have an objective and then to endeavor to arrive at it through an exact knowledge of the public and modifying circumstances to manipulate and sway that public.

Propaganda, since it goes to basic causes, is most effective through the manner of its introduction.The media by which leaders transmit their messages to the public include all the means by which people today transmit their ideas to one another. There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. There are multitudes of other avenues of approach to the public mind, some old, some new as television.

The relative value of the various instruments of propaganda, and their relation to the masses, are constantly changing.

The only propaganda which will ever tend to weaken itself as the world becomes more sophisticated and intelligent is propaganda that is untrue or unsocial.

Joseph Goebbels, March 1933:

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.