ED
BERNAYS, SPINMASTER (2007)
Mika Brzezinski should get a raise. Last week, the MSNBC
news host refused to report the day's lead story. "We're
not covering this," she announced. "I'm done with the Paris
Hilton story." Brzezinski got out her lighter, and
unsuccessfully flicked away at her script. "Will you burn
this for me please?" she said to a co- anchor later in the
broadcast, after ripping it up and crumpling it into a
ball. "My producer's not listening to me," she said in
frustration, as her co-anchors picked up the ball,
literally, to yammer on about the latest pratfall from the
Hilton heiress.
This revealing moment demonstrates how U.S. newscasters are
tiring of Paris updates, yet producers keep trying to push
the party girl ahead of the war in Iraq and corruption in
Washington.
Whether it's Paris, Don Imus, or the late Anna Nicole
Smith, there always seems to be a troubled celeb to rotate
on the 24-hour news cycle, pushing bigger stories to the
margins. But to her credit, the MSNBC reporter momentarily
pulled back the curtain, revealing the farcical mechanics
behind the Great Oz of American infotainment.
Watching this telling moment, I couldn't but help think of
the late Edward Louis Bernays.
Most people have never heard of Edward Bernays, yet he was
once named one of the most influential figures of the 20th
century by Life magazine. Born in Vienna in 1891, the
nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is considered the
chief architect of mass persuasion, or as he called it,
"engineering consent." In the BBC documentary Century of
the Self, an elderly Bernays explained how he rebranded his
field of endeavour, "propaganda," as "public relations."
This was just one of his many memorable acts of spin.
Bernays held that human beings are fundamentally irrational
and untrustworthy, and that it's the duty of social
programmers to manipulate the herd for their own good. He
helped popularize Freud's ideas in the United States, and
sold leaders in business and politics on the value of
exploiting the unconscious mind to sell everything from
automobiles to foreign campaigns.
In his 1928 book Propaganda, he wrote: "If we understand
the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not
possible to control and regiment the masses according to
our will without them knowing about it? The recent practice
of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up
to a certain point and within certain limits."
Freud's nephew didn't just theorize about persuasion, he
put it into practice. After opening an office in New York
in 1919, he became a master at using consumers' virtuous
beliefs to serve other ends. One way he managed this was
through public relations stunts, as when he successfully
showed tobacco companies how to maximize their profit by
reaching a new target audience, women. He staged a public
event where "suffragettes" marched in the streets of New
York with their new symbol of self-expression, cigarettes,
or as Bernays called them, "torches of freedom." On his
signal, models struck up their Lucky Strikes in front of
waiting photographers.
Among Bernay's many accounts were Cartier, Best Foods,
Proctor & Gamble, CBS, General Electric and Dodge
Motors. He was the first to master the art of product
placement, by cross-marketing his clients' services and
products.
The man didn't just move product, he moved armies. In 1954,
the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo
Arbenz, nationalized areas occupied by Bernays' client, The
United Fruit Company. The public relations conjurer
responded by using the U.S. media to paint Guatemala as a
communist regime and a domestic threat. His work helped set
the stage for a CIA-organized military coup and a
decades-long U.S. client/torture state.
Bernays' vision for the herd has come a long way. His
successors have mastered the dark arts of persuasion, using
semantic conjuring, psychographics, focus groups and
inflated rumours. One infamous example is the story of
Iraqis killing babies in Kuwaiti hospital incubators, a
fairy tale hatched by the Washington PR firm Hill and
Knowlton in 1990, to convince Congress to back the first
Gulf War. There are countless other examples of tall tales
from the public relations-media-military complex, from the
rescue of U.S. private Jessica Lynch in Iraq to Saddam's
WMDs and beyond.
This brings us back to the celebs du jour who front the
24-hour news shows. Brzezinski's eruption against
Paris-piffle seemed a rare thing: a news reporter
abandoning her script for the real story about robber
barons with briefcases, even while being mocked by her
co-anchors for acting like "a journalist." It was a moment
of human truth, a moment that Edward Bernays would have
found difficult to stage.
Unless,
of course, Mika's moment was also theatre.
Geoff Olson
