IN THE 1950S, Lerner had spent months in the Turkish Anatolian town of Balgat in order to study how new methods of media and propaganda could induce Turkish villagers—and uneducated peoples all over the Middle East—to embrace the United States as the quintessence of modernity. An epigraph from André Siegfried appears early in the book: “The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the entire world.”
