Bernays' work is certainly important but I think the amount of credit he's typically given for the idea that propaganda could be wielded in peacetime is undeserved. That distinction really belongs to Walter Lippmann, who had begun formulating the idea 5-10 years earlier and articulating it in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), well before Propaganda (1928). Propaganda was really more of a formalization of something that was already understood to exist.

Hah! Funny, I was just talking to my flatmate yesterday about Bernays :)

+1 on the recommendation for Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.

There's a snippet in there about how Bernays was brought in during the creation of easy bake goods ie add 2 eggs and some butter to make some fudge (as I did yesterday)

Anyway, they initially tried to just have no ingredients required but during trials with housewives, found they felt like imposters who lacked agency during the baking process.

The solution? The baker adds one egg, which isn't included in the ready mix ingredients

"The Century Of The Self" by Adam Curtis is a great documentary series on Bernays and the PR industry he invented. Gets scary towards the end when you realize that mainstream political discourse is now managed using the same PR methods that took over the business world a generation before.

There’s a Mad Men episode where someone asks Don Draper if “all this stuff actually works” and Draper says, “who knows?” (paraphrasing).

Like many, I learned of Bernays through Adam Curtis’ documentary, “The Century of the Self.” But many years later, I wonder — where’s the evidence that Bernays ideas were actually effective? I love Curtis films, and I think there’s a lot of great ideas in them — but it’s also easy to be hypnotized by them and forget to be critical.

Anyway, would be interested if anyone’s found any research that makes a compelling case that Bernays’ ideas actually work, and that he wasn’t just a really good salesman for his own services.

Lets not forget Ivy Lee who really founded the modern PR industry.

Ivy Lee rebranded Rockefeller as america's lovable, generous and charitable "grandpa" by having him give money to children on camera and setting up family controlled "charities". Which has been copied by many wealthy people since. Most recently by Bill Gates and his family controlled charities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Lee

Funnily enough, both bernays and lee were journalists... But then again, newspapers have always been PR and journalists have always been influencers/PR workers.

I first learned about Bernays from attending a live episode of "Stuff You Should Know" in Los Angeles. The full show was about Edward Bernays. Hair nets and Bananas both owe their popularity to Bernays. The "Stuff You Should Know" podcast that eventually posted nicely covers all the points but I couldn't find it on their website since iHeart Radio bought them and removed their website.

"The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu nicely covers some of Bernays' influence, in the context of advertising and other forms of attention capture from the 19th century through present day. Can't recommend the book enough.

I learned a lot of the techniques pioneered by Bernays in school. It was the basis of a lot of our public communication lessons. I'd always assumed these were just things that had been collectively figured out over time, I never realized there was one person essentially responsive for spreading that kind of manipulation.

I wonder what the world would be like if major corporations, governments and just about everybody trying to convince people of something hadn't latched onto his ideas and built modern society around them.

The book "Men Who Stare at Goats" (no idea about the movie) is a terrifying look at the weaponization of the technique turned on the American public.

You have to read between the lines: most people believe the CIA really was exploring use of ESP against the Soviets. Very, very few understand that it was a successful propaganda operation against the American public. Those few also have a clue how we were collectively convinced that invading Iraq would be a really good idea.

Robert Evans did two excellent episodes on Bernays on his Behind the Bastards podcast.

Part 1: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Part 2: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Coronavirus has a great PR team

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/

I enjoyed reading Edward Bernay's book title: Propaganda. Some examples resonates so well even in 2020 with advertisement industry.

the documentary about this https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/

An interesting overview of Edward Bernays' life, work, and life's work cementing his position as the creator of modern commercial propaganda is Larry Tye's _The Father of Spin_. It's the source of a hundred little ingenious anecdotes that demonstrate the imagination behind Bernays' campaigns, but one of the most alarming is that of Beech-nut bacon. Here I quote from one of Bernays' own books, 'Biography of an Idea':

"The sales of Beechnut bacon were falling off because people had slimmed down their breakfast to a piece of toast, orange juice and a cup of coffee.[...] Beechnut favoured breakfast habits of a century before, when people started their day with bacon and eggs, doughnuts, pie and coffee. If the trend of breakfasts could be reversed, beechnut, the dominant breakfast bacon, would regain its sales. Physicians confirmed to me [i.e. Bernays] that heavy breakfasts were scientifically desirable. The body needs food replenishment twelve hours after an evening meal. I enlisted a well-known New York phyisican, Dr A L Goldwater, to write to phyisicians thoughout the country for their opinion on heavy verses light breakfasts. Physicians from all over the country gave overwhelming support to the hearty breakfast. Six months after widespread publicity on the survey, Bartlett Arkell, president of Beechnut, announced that Beechnut sales of bacon had increased “enormousely in the past half year. Nothing else did it , except the recommendation of American doctors.”/

Bernays recounts this anecdote in such a way as to minimise the appearance that he himself deliberately sought or bought trusted medical opinions to confirm his campaigns: they simply 'confirmed' things to him. But while the Lucky Strike and soap-carving contests he organised often get the most attention - they're beautiful works of creative showmanship and inventive campaigning - quick portraits of his work tend to obscure just how data-driven he actually was. Rare was the PR stunt he pulled without extremely thorough research behind him.

It's also traditional to comment that either Ivy Lee or Walter Lippmann were in fact the 'real' fathers of public relations. One of Edward Bernays' most interesting commentators was Jacques Ellul, whose work expands and develops the role of propaganda in mass or atomised society. He's not well-known in the Anglophone sphere because he published in French, but his book 'Propaganda' has been translated into English and, despite first being published in 1962, actually remains shockingly relevant. In his estimation, 'public opinion' was infinitely malleable, and any political or commercial system that answered to public opinion, without recognising just how vulnerable that was to anyone with an agenda and a good means of delivering misinformation, was doomed. Both he and Bernays make excellent reading in the context of modern political advertising and 'populism' i.e. when public opinion is led or actively wanders into dangerous territory.

I encourage anyone interested in this topic to listen to this podcast: Radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/glen-weyl-radically-....