Has anyone seen it? A series of four 1 hour-long documentaries by Popbitch's Adam Curtis about the 20th century public relations industry and how it has continuously managed, shaped, and cajoled public opinion towardd elite interests, lest the "bewildered herd" (to use Walter Lippmann's phrase) of the people not act in their own best interests.
Having sat through all 4 installments of the series, which starts with Sigmund Freud, but especially his American nephew Edward Bernays (who wrote _Propaganda_ in 1927, the blueprint for the modern PR industry, but then changed the name "propaganda" to "public relations" after Goebbels dragged the term "propaganda" through the mud), I was struck by the notable absence of the living guru on this sort of thing -- Noam Chomsky!
Indeed, the 2nd part of Curtis's series is called "The Engineering of Consent." PR firms, finessing the US public into an anti-communist hysteria, focus groups and advertising agencies inculcating internalized ideologies of consumerism and capitalism -- it's all stuff Ed Herman and Chomsky discussed and have even brow-beaten people about for decades. But the entirety of the series pays not one nod to Chomsky, who developed the "propaganda model" as an intellectual defense tool against the sort of public brainwashing Freud's nephew and his cohorts developed, beginning with the Creel Commission of Wilson, and others, which are explored in "The Century of the Self." The end of the "Century of the Self" shows how remarkable capitalism is at re-purposing, or perhaps sanitizing, radical ideas and slogans to promote its own agendas. Baffler-type territory.
In any event, it's a great 4 part series. But it's odd that for all the mentioning of Walter Lippmann, and the elitism of "public relations" intellectuals who felt they must guide the bewildered herd of voters to see their own best interests (including becoming rabidly anti-Communist in the most hysterical of instances, such as in Guatemala and its United Fruit Company fiasco, covered in the film), Curtis never once references Chomsky, _The Manufacturing of Consent_, Edward S. Herman, or the propaganda model Herman and Chomsky developed that can act as an effective intellectual counterforce to the sort of media manipulation and mass control Curtis details.
The 4 episodes are online 4 here:
-B.