Media

This is the richest seam in the material and the easiest place to start, partly because the people who built the field wrote it all down and were proud of it. Nothing here had to be exposed.

The founding documents

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922) coined the phrase the manufacture of consent. His argument is that the public is necessarily governed by stereotypes, the pictures in our heads, because the real environment is too large and complex to know directly. His conclusion is elitist rather than critical: since the public cannot govern itself competently, a specialized class has to manage opinion. Read it as an admission from an insider.

Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928). Freud's nephew and the literal inventor of public relations. The book opens by stating that the conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an essential part of democratic society, carried out by an invisible governing body. He applied psychoanalytic ideas to markets: sell the desire, not the product. His Torches of Freedom campaign attached cigarettes to women's emancipation. He published the method with pride, which makes it the best primary source in the field.

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1962) is the deepest and the least comfortable. Propaganda, for Ellul, is not primarily lies. It is a condition of technological mass society. It works best on the educated, who consume the most information, believe themselves immune, and need a coherent opinion about everything. He separates agitation propaganda, which stirs people up, from integration propaganda, the slow kind that produces conformity to an existing order, and he argues the second matters far more. Any reading that treats propaganda as something governments do to stupid people should be corrected by this book.

The structural model

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988) set out the propaganda model and its five filters: ownership, advertising as the revenue source, dependence on official sources, organized negative response, and an external enemy or ideological frame.

The key claim is structural rather than conspiratorial. No orders are given. People who have internalized the constraints are the ones who get promoted, and they are not lying when they say nobody tells them what to write.

Objections to keep attached: the model is functionalist and hard to falsify, it underweights how audiences actually read things, and it underweights conflict inside newsrooms. The media economy it describes, of mass advertising and few outlets, has changed a great deal since 1988, and what the platform-era version looks like is a live question rather than a settled one.

The industry that produced the consumer

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (1976) is the historical record of advertising setting out, deliberately and in writing, to produce consumers as a social type rather than to sell particular goods. His PR! A Social History of Spin (1996) does the same for public relations after Bernays.

This is where the media domain stops being about messages and becomes about the manufacture of a kind of person, which is the same move Foucault makes about the subject and Rose makes about the self.

The medium as the message

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) makes the Huxley-not-Orwell argument: the danger is not a boot but a medium that makes serious public argument impossible by converting everything into entertainment. Pair it with Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry: mass culture as standardized industrial production that pacifies, offers pseudo-individuality, and turns leisure into an extension of work. The story of how that argument collided with American audience research is in the Radio Project, which is the more useful way in.

Before broadcast

Gabriel Tarde argued in 1901 that the modern political formation is not the crowd in a square but the public: dispersed, never assembled, held together only by many people reading the same newspaper on the same morning. He identified the mediated public decades before radio, and network theory has since rehabilitated him. What his mechanism does when everyone reads a different feed at a different time is one of the open questions.

He was arguing against Le Bon, whose The Crowd (1895) is weak as science and historically decisive, having been read by Mussolini, by Hitler and by the founders of public relations. Both are in older foundations.

The materialist floor under all of it is Innis: which medium a society runs on decides what kind of authority can be built with it.

Where the money shows

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is the historical case of a well-funded field being shaped without a single lie being told, and the Radio Project is the case of a funding structure quietly deciding what a discipline was allowed to find.