Reading Propaganda by Edward Bernays. Although Bernays is popularly portrayed as an anti-democratic elitist, he was – by the standards of his time – liberal and progressive.
He ends the book with a typical progressive sentiment – that more education, and better information will make public debate more reasoned and more enlightened:
If the public is better informed about the processes of its life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests.
That’s why he’s a progressive. But then there’s the kicker:
No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.
In other words, our animalistic instincts will never cease being an express elevator to the psychological basement. That’s why he’s an elitist.
This tension underlies the public service notion of modern journalism. It’s the “schizophrenia” that Michael Schudson talks about when he writes:
I propose that the news media should be self-consciously schizophrenic in their efforts to perform a democratic political function. They should both champion the kind of democracy that the political scientists say we have little chance of achieving and, at the same time, they should imaginatively respond to the realities of contemporary politics that the scholars have observed.
And Schudson is really just refining for the media what F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a self-lacerating piece for Esquire, back in 1936:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.
2 responses to “Double standards in propaganda, journalism and life”
Hmm… I wonder: is this perhaps part of the conflict btwn mass and niche media? I hate double standards, but as a case in point: my main employer is actually called Propaganda, and it’s torn btwn niche and mass media thinking. It’s partly owned by Norway’s equivalent of ITV, so the ‘mass-media mindset’ is very present. This mindset wants any article to get as many online hits as possible, in other words: put boobs, sex, celebrity, porn in your headlines. But too much of that, and its advertisers, who’re flocking there to reach a specific audience, will shy away.
Just thinking off the cuff here. I don’t think I’d agree with Bernays, but sounds like it’d make for interesting reading. I found Gustav Le Bon quite compelling, but never been a big fan of Freud. Did you, by the way, read Yalome’s “When Nietzche wept”? I really liked that book, made me think, interesting from the early days of psychoanalysis, and used to be quited fascinated by Nietzsche, more for psychological than philosophical reasons
There’s an interesting conflict between the desire by advertisers to segment/divide audiences and the methods needed to ensure their participation/inclusion.
Haven’t read the Yalome book. Bernays is interesting because he contains all the confusion of progressive elitism and anti-democratic populism. And that’s two more -isms than I ever like to put in a sentence