Thursday, January 17, 2013

DEMOCRACY = "The Manufacture Of Consent"

To James Thurber, in a 1943 New Yorker cartoon, Walter Lippmann was the object of respectful humor:  Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations,

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/34278/harry-c-mcpherson-jr/walter-lippmann-and-the-american-century#

          a wife looks up from a newspaper and tells her husband, Lippmann scares me this morning.
  • To Judge Learned Hand, Colonel House, and five hundred guests at a testimonial dinner in 1931,
  • he was, in the words of Time magazine,
  • "their Moses, their prophet of Liberalism."
  • To Dean Acheson, writing his memoirs, he was "that ambivalent Jeremiah."
  • To Woodrow Wilson, for whom Lippmann prepared several of the famous Fourteen Points, his judgment was "most unsound";
  • to Lyndon Johnson, it was ultimately far worse than that.
Lippmann was America's, and perhaps the world's, most influential journalist.
  • Walter Lippmann – who shaped progressive “journalism,” said,
  • In the absence of institutions and education 
  • by which the environment is so successfully reported
  • that the realities of public life stand out very sharply
  • against self-centered opinion
  • the common interests very largely elude
  • public opinion entirely, and
  • can be managed only by a specialized class
  • democracy is “the manufacture of consent” 
  • citizensare mentally children.”

Edward Bernays said:
  • The conscious and intelligent manipulation
  • of the organized habits and opinions of the masses 
  • is an important element in democratic society
  • Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism
  • of society constitute an invisible government
  • which is the true ruling power of our country

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