This story is, of course, far from credible. Adults, like children, are by no means immune to the marketeer’s message, as Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, realised in the 1920s. ‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote in his book Propaganda, ‘… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’27 Bernays invented the ‘public relations’ industry and rapidly became America’s master wire-puller, convincing women (on behalf of the American Tobacco Corporation) that cigarettes were their
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