Propaganda

by Edward L. Bernays

As early as 1941, the independent journalist George Seldes was intrepidly reporting on the pertinent medical discoveries in his tiny muckraking journal, In Fact. With the exception of the Reader’s Digest, no other American news source, print or broadcast, dared even to hint at what tobacco scientists were finding out—an advertising-induced blackout that persisted, by and large, until the Seventies. Such was the clout of the tobacco companies, which used Bernays’s sort of propaganda genius to keep most people blithely unaware of what they were inhaling. Although Bernays did see the light about tobacco, then, and did the honorable thing, the fact is that corporate propaganda squelches inconvenient journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate, and growing ills receive no mass attention. As with the risks of smoking, so it has been, until very recently, with global warming, and so it is today with the carcinogenicity of cell phones, and the toxic side effects of fluoride, just to name a few underreported threats to public health. In all such cases, the investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest, while the latter tends to work against it.