academic Noam Chomsky
concerning political power using propaganda to distort and distract from major issues to maintain confusion and complicity, preventing real democracy from becoming effective. The title of this book borrows a phrase from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr
.
Nearly the entire first half of the book is based on Chomsky's five 1988 Massey Lectures
on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio
from November 1988 and extends his and Edward S. Herman
's propaganda model
to a variety of new situations.
In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.
It is supposed, beyond question, that what the United States does and stands for is right and good; if others fail to recognize this moral rectitude, plainly they are at fault. The naivete is not without a certain childish appeal — which quickly fades, however, when we recognize how it is converted into an instrument for inflicting suffering and pain.
The Times and other media were being spoon-fed material by the public relations specialists of the United Fruit Company|United Fruit Company, though, as its PR director Thomas McCann later wrote: "It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience."