Chapter 3

Footnotes

For example, (see Introduction, above) "Nova, Eastern Europe's first nation-wide commercial television station," presents itself in advertising as providing "...TV for the average Joe," in which "newscasts will be 'punchier.' Nova, in the Czech Republic, plans to give audiences "Breakfast talk shows, sitcoms and feature films, as well as top sports events, and music videos." "Commercial television," claims Nova, "is bringing Europe into the 'mainstream...' with programming aimed at the 'average citizen.'" From a UPI report on Saturday, February 5, 1994.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates serve as a good example. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin Books: New York, 1986) 57-61.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
See Matti Aura, "Ilmaisten lounaiden aika on ohi," ("The Era of the Free Lunch is Over"), in Helgingin Sanomat, 25 August, 1994, C6, a review of Kjell-Olof Feldt, Rädda välfärdstaten (Norstedt, 1994) In Finland, as in Sweden, some of the basic principles and programs of the welfare state, such as compensation for families with children ("lapsilisä"), are under review by conservative governments.
Most local, commercial, radio broadcasters in Finland have had no trouble emulating this style. What is interesting is, that the Finnish state-owned broadcaster, Radio Mafia, which plays mostly rock music and is aimed at the under-35 age group, uses the same style of discourse -- without commercials! This means, of course, that the commercial discourse style is, in Scandinavia at least, synonymous with youth and rebelliousness. These are, of course, the same themes which first appeared in the United States in the early 1950s (In the film, "The Rebel without a Cause," for example.)
Ironically, this form of public discussion could, in fact, be interpreted as "old-fashioned" by American audiences, since public radio and television in America, where this style does not dominate, began broadcasting at a much later date and could, therefore, be described as a "modern" style of public discourse. Neil Postman, for example, stated in an interview with C-Span, that "talking heads," among some audiences, seem to be returning in popularity -- and C-Span is one example of this trend.
Piers Brandon writes: "...By the third decade of the nineteenth century there were fortunes to be made from journalism....the commercial bourgeoisie, who owed their wealth to industrial expansion and the new market economy, did not simply buy newspapers, they bought the wares advertised in them. By the 1830s a proliferation of manufactured goods, displayed in the shop window of the press, had enormously increased its advertising revenue. This was the crucial factor in transforming newspapers into a capitalist industry, founding the fourth estate and spawning the press barons." The Life and Death of the Press Barons (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 17.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin Books: New York, 1986) 57-61. Postman uses the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois, in 1858. The debates lasted all day, but the audience stayed and listened to a style of discourse which, according to Postman, was "typographical," and not conversational. American audiences, today, would not have the patience for such discourse, says Postman.
Cynicism and corruption flourished in business and government during the period, as did the slogan: "Get rich!" ..."This country is fast becoming filled with gigantic corporations, wielding and controlling immense aggregations of money and thereby commanding great influence and power," a Congressional committee warned the nation in 1873.
Quoted from Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain Social Critic (New York: International, 1958), 213. See also: Gutman, Herbert George. Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Ira Berlin, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.

One popular song of protest during the era went as follows:

Lo! the car of Juggernaut,
Lo! the ruin it hath wrought,
As it moves o'er hill and dale
Riding on its iron rail,
Will you let the idol grim
Tear ye, brothers, limb from limb,
And your breath of Freedom choke
With its clouds of poisoned smoke?
No! then onward to the fray
Hurl the monster from your way,
Let your cry of battle be
Death to all Monopoly!

(Author unknown)
Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain Social Critic (New York: International, 1958), 90. Quoted from Mark Twain, The New York Tribune, September 27, 1871. See also: Gutman, Herbert George. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass Whitman, (New York: Modern Library, 1993).
Dan Hallin, The Uncensored War: the Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63-72.
As late as the turn of the century, most newspapers were backed financially by individuals, political parties or groups with a particular point of view. No pretenses about balance or objectivity were made, says Hallin.
Theodore Peterson, "Mass Media and Their Environments: A Journey into the Past," in Elie Abel (ed.), What's News (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies), 17-18.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 14-21.
Theodore Peterson, "Mass Media and Their Environments," 19.
H. G. Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Ira Berlin, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. For a more detailed discussion of this division in American society from a Marxist point of view, see Jürgen Kuczynski, Gestalten und Werke, (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1969).
The increasingly aggressive nature of American foreign policy caused Twain to write The War Prayer, in which he cynically ridiculed religion and patriotism:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land...

Irving Babbit, "An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts," The New Laokoon (New York, 1910), 241. Quoted in Robert Weimann, "New Criticism" und die Entwicklung buergerlicher Literaturwissenschaft (Max Niemeyer: Halle, 1962), 36.
See William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973).
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), 10.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. (Vols I and II: The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860, and The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Jack London, although a popular writer, could be included here, but his novel, The Iron Heel, is best known for its prediction of fascism in America -- far from being an expose of corruption or a utopian novel.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, 14-21. See also: Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
In his book, The Life and Death of the Press Barons (New York: Atheneum, 1983), Piers Brendon mentions some of these bizarre topics: "A Parrot that Went Mad from Fright," "A Night in a Snake's Throat," "Facts about Fairies," "Buried Alive in Salt," "Those Strange Things Found in Tunnels," 112. Brendon also reports (on page 134) William Randolf Hearst as once having suggested that:

...the modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection to facts if they are also novel. But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News, 91-119.
Piers Brandon also makes this point in his discussion of the dispute in New York between Pulitzer and Hearst which was, first and foremost, a dispute over audience share and which audience would belong to which newspaper.

As Newsom and Wollert have already pointed out,

..."news" means "disasters, accidents, epidemics...Good Samaritan stories...crime...a drought...human interest stories, stories with drama, stories about things that are ironic or even bizarre, stories that are humorous or entertaining...a snowstorm in a neighboring city...news is conflict...the more prominent the person, the more likely his or her activities will qualify as news...news is surprising."

Doug Newsom and James Wollert, Media Writing: News for the Mass Media (California: Wadsworth, 1985), 12-13.
"In the beginning was the word ...and the air was filled with screwball comedy, crooners' songs -- and suds." See Edward Bliss, Jr. and John M. Patterson, Writing News for Broadcast, 4.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a modern potentate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 10.

A fabulous power concentration had thus emerged from the little black box of Guglielmo Marconi. It seemed certain to control future developments in the world of the ether, and all ramifications of the vacuum tube. The partners, insofar as they could foresee the future of the electronic world, divided it between them.

And for a more detailed picture of the early years of radio, see Barnouw's first chapter, "Forebears," in Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (Oxford University Press: New York, 1990), 23.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, 11.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, 12.
Edward Bliss, Jr. and John M. Patterson, Writing News for Broadcast, 4.
In 1927 the Federal Radio Commission reduced the total number of stations in the United States, of which about one tenth were by educational institutions. "Almost all stations operated by educational institutions received part-time assignments, in most cases confined to day-time hours." Radio in the public service, therefore, was not a welcome concept. Barnouw quotes a Harvard Business Review study which concluded that "the point seems clear that the Federal Radio Commission has interpreted the concept of public interest so as to favor in actual practice one particular group ... the commercial broadcasters." See Barnouw, The Sponsor, 28.

In 1925 there were 128 stations licensed to colleges and universities, with a like number licensed to other non-profits. The growing minority of commercial owners didn't use their stations to make money, but for "image advertising," creating visibility and goodwill in the community.

Still, the early signs of commercialization were viewed with distrust by a wide range of public opinion, including Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, whose department oversaw the fledgling field. He decried the growing trend of cheap amusements displacing public affairs and educational programming, he praised the college stations as "a step toward the realization of the true mission of radio," and he argued against the rise of advertising because the radio listener, unlike the reader could not "ignore advertising in which he is not interested."

In 1924, Hoover solicited major foundations to subsidize educational programming and proposed a 2% tax on radio sets to "pay for daily programs of the best talent and skill." This later idea was also promoted by RCA's David Sarnoff, who called for boadcasting to be conducted by a national non-profit corporation, funded by those who profited from the manufacture and sale of radio sets.

"A Little History Lesson: Commercials Aren't Solution," Copyright Paul Rosenberg, 1995. Published In The Los Angeles Times, Counterpunch, May 8, 1995.
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 74-77. This effort was led by Senators Robert Wagner of New York and Henry Hatfield of West Virginia. The fight against commercial radio was summarized by James Rorty , who wrote in 1934:

The American apparatus of advertising is something unique in history...It is like a grotesque, smirking gargoyle set at the very top of America's skyscraping adventure in acquisition ad infinitum ...The gargoyle's mouth is a loudspeaker, powered by the vested interest of a two-billion dollar industry, and back of that the vested interests of business as a whole, of industry, of finance. It is never silent, it drowns out all other voices, and it suffers no rebuke, for is it not the voice of America?...For at least two generations of Americans--the generations that grew up during the war and after -- have listened to that voice as to an oracle. It has taught them how to live, what to be afraid of, what to be proud of, how to be beautiful, how to be loved, how to be envied, how to be successful.

In The Sponsor, 37, Barnouw comments that: "Thus the sponsor-supported system had, by 1940, won a secure place and growing prosperity. It seemed headed for a glittering future."
Martin Dies of Texas, for example, head of the Dies Committee which, during the postwar period became the House Un-American Activities Committee, protested wartime consensus and, according to Barnouw, predicted, quite correctly, a day of reckoning.
One of the reasons behind Charlie Chaplin's forced departure from Hollywood was his activity on behalf of the Soviet Union during the war.
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 95-96.
These were the same networks which were originally involved in radio and had their origins in the companies holding the patents for electronic equipment. See Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 42.
Kenneth Hey, "Marty: Aesthetics vs. Medium in Early Television Drama," in American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past, by John E. O'Conner (Ed.), (New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1987), 95-133. Arthur Frank Wertheim, "The Rise and Fall of Milton Berle," in American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past , by John E. O'Conner (Ed.), (New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1987), 55-78.
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 99-148.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, 47.
On Tonight, Jack Paar would lead his many guests through carefully timed periods of entertaining conversation -- each period, however, leading up to a commercial break. Paar's technique, later to be developed into "concision," became the prototype for all "talkshows" seen today on American television.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, 44.
Philip Agee, The Monthly Planet, June, 1991.
According to government document NSC 68, as quoted by Philip Agee, The Monthly Planet, a publication of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County. Monthly Planet 6/91 (PeaceNet, propaganda.rev)
The film Atomic Cafe illustrates this climate very well, in the Archives Project, produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty (New York, NY: First Run Features Home Video, c1993).
George Thayer, The War Business: The International Trade in Armaments (New York: Avon, 1969), 34-39.
From The Trials of Alger Hiss, a film produced and directed by John Lowenthal (Los Angeles: Direct Cinema Limited, 1982) in the series "A History on Film Production," documentary and factual review of the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss controversy.
Clubb was interviewed in The Trials of Alger Hiss, a film produced and directed by John Lowenthal. See also: Oliver Edmund Clubb's autobiography, The Witness and I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
George Comstock, Television in America (The Sage CommText Series, Vol.1), (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991, 24.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 25.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 31.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 32.
See Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (New York: Seaver Books/H. Holt, 1988).
"The first big break in the atmosphere of repression came with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 which guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 1937." According to Gus Hall, active in steel organizing, "Up until then, you would stand at the gate, maybe sign up one or two. Workers would not talk to you. When the Wagner Act passed, the next morning they lined up for blocks to sign for the union. The union was legal. It was a totally different ballgame." Denise Winebrenner, People's Weekly World, October 15,1994.
Joyce L. Kornbluh,ed. Rebel Voices, an I.W.W. Anthology. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).
Philip S. Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, in A History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 4 (New York, 1965).
For more information about the role played by Finnish immigrants in the IWW, see: Reino Kero, The Finns in North America (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1980).
Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The story of Syndicalism in the United States (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1968), 103.
All around the country the "Wobblies" were being charged with conspiring to violate the criminal syndicalist laws. "Ninety-three of the defendants," were charged in Chicago, alone, in 1918, and "given sentences ranging from four to thirty-eight years and fined from twenty to thirty thousand dollars."
"One Big Union--that is their crime. That is why the I.W.W. is on trial. ...So the outcry of the jackal press, 'German agents! Treason!'--that the I.W.W. may be lynched on a grand scale."
John Stuart, ed., The Education of John Reed: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 211-213.
"The Red scare of 1919-20 served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the steel and other industries."
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 32.
Philip Foner, The case of Joe Hill, (New York: International Publishers, 1966).
Renshaw's conclusion is that the Paterson strike demonstrated that "Collective leadership," as was the practice within the IWW, "worked better among the more fully assimilated migratory workers in the West." But, "collective leadership was not suited to Eastern conditions, where masses of partly assimilated immigrant workers needed firm direction to unite for industrial action on a permanent basis."
Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The story of Syndicalism in the United States (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1968), 118.
The founding of the New Masses also demonstrates the effectiveness of a liberal-worker coalition. The literary journal's editor, Mike Gold, called for a coalition with liberals, a tactic which later succeeded remarkably well.
Staughton Lynd, "The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930's," in Radical America, 1971, 57.
"Becker outlined the achievements of the Steelworkers Union from a rise in the standard of living for Black, Brown, white and women workers to mobilizing the decisive forces to defeat fascism in World War II. When most historians cite the decades of the 1930s and '40s they say, 'And then the union came in,' as if by magic." Denise Winebrenner, People's Weekly World, October 15, 1994.
Gus Hall, son of a Finnish immigrant, and chairman of the CPUSA since 1959, has stated that, "We made a very calculated decision that organization of the basic industries was possible and necessary. We started the whole movement based on the conclusion that the labor movement could not defend the interests of workers until basic industries were organized."
Hall, originally Arvo Hallberg, is descended from Finnish immigrants. "Hall, then a member of the CPUSA and the Young Communist League, went to work as a welder at Truscon Steel in Youngstown, Ohio. Later, he worked at Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Before then, Hall had worked in the logging camps and iron mines of Northern Minnesota. He would become a machinist mate in the U.S. Navy during WW II, in charge of an engine repair depot in Guam. ...'We started setting up rank and file committees in the mill - union committees,' Hall said. 'Some led important strikes, like the famous strike at Republic Steel in Warren, Ohio led by mainly Finnish-American workers. ...The first big break in the atmosphere of repression came with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 which guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 1937. 'The situation changed totally overnight,' said Hall. ...About the same time Hall made the front page of the Youngstown Vindicator - again. 'I had run for city council as a Communist,' he said. 'Then, in order to get a job I changed my name from Arvo Halberg to Gus Hall. Then I decied to do it legally. But when I went to city hall I found out it cost five dollars - and I didn't have it.' ...Denise Winebrenner, People's Weekly World, October 15, 1994.
Waldo Frank, writing in Eberhard Bruening, "Progressive American Writers' Organizations and their Impact on Literature during the Nineteen Thirties," in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik No. 3 (1975), 208.
See also: Rolf Meyn, Die "Rote Dekade": Studien zur Literaturkritik und Romanliteratur der dreißiger Jahre in den USA (Hamburg: Hamburger Buchagentur, 1980).
The John Reed Clubs also provided inspiration and a "nucleus for young writers... Within two or three years after the Depression had reached its depth, a score of 'little' magazines, most of them devoted to proletarian literature, had sprung up." Among these were: The Anvil (Minnesota), Left Front (Chicago), Left Review (Philadelphia), Leftward (Boston), and New Force (Detroit).
Jack Conroy and Curt Johnson, eds., Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology 1933-1940 (New York: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1973), xi.
"When the CIO was launched, and through its first decade, the Communists and others on the left associated with them, were its most active forces, especially inorganization of new industries adn areas."
George Morris, American Labor: Which Way? (New York: New Century Publishers, 1961), 30.
George Morris, American Labor: Which Way? 30.
For viewpoints expressed by the American Communist Party, see William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, published by International Publishers and The Case for Industrial Organization (CIO Publications, No.4: Washington, D.C.), March, 1936.
These feelings were expressed based on personal observations of the Roosevelt years by the noted scientist Freeman J. Dyson who worked with J. Oppenheimer on the development of the first Atomic Bomb. From an interview in the documentary film: "The Day after Trinity." Produced and directed by Jon Else; written by David Peoples, Janet Peoples, Jon Else. Santa Monica, CA: Pyramid Film & Video, 1980.
Philip Agee, The Monthly Planet. June, 1991. (An online publication of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County.) Found in the IGC computer networks' conference propaganda.rev.
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. (Contemporary American History Series.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda and American Ideological Critique," in James. A. Anderson (ed.), Communication Yearbook/14 (Newbury Park: Sage Publications), 1991, 213.

Television advertising is mainly of consumer goods that are readily subject to organized boycott. Curing the McCarthy years, many advertisers and radio and television stations were effectively coerced into quiescence and blacklisting of employees by the threats of determined Red hunters to boycott products. Advertisers are still concerned to avoid offending constituencies that might produce flak, and their demand for suitable programming is a continuing feature of the media environment. If certain kinds of fact, position, or program are thought likely to elicit flak, this prospect can be a deterrent.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 26.
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 109-110, 127-128.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, 48.
Their company, American Business Consultants, started operations with money provided by Alfred Kohlberg, a Chiang Kai-shek supporter and anti-Communist.
George Comstock, Television in America (The Sage CommText Series, Vol.1), (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991), 54. Comstock points out that the "political blacklist" and "rising concerns of advertisers" caused "restrictions" on program content to increase.

Philip Agee, writing in the Monthly Planet of June, 1991, a publication of the the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County, explains the origins of the repressive atmosphere in America:

The decision eventually taken at the top echelon of the Truman administration was military. It was to rearm the United States, and for the United States to finance the rearming of Western Europe. The way chosen was through US financing of European rearmament.

Consequently, writes Agee:

In the public at large there was also opposition because of the additional taxes that this program would require. So Truman could not get it through at the beginning.

The media, including television, many critics, including Agee, claim, were and still are implicated with the US government in a conscious attempt to shape public opinion, and to bring it into conformity with the new postwar American foreign policy. The most severe critics of this era, however, compare the atmosphere generated by the McCarthyist witchhunts with that of German fascism. Some even speak of a "massive assault on the American mind," comparable to "the attack on the German mind by...the Nazi Party." [See Philip Bonosky, The Background to American Literature Since the War (Potsdam, 1967), 22.] However, in spite of its severity, few other critics share the point of view that American corporate capitalism is synonymous with German nazism.
Murrow, at the end of that program in 1954 which exposed McCarthy, stated: "This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. ...As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves -- as indeed -- we are -- the defenders of freedom, what's left of it... Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'" Daniel J. Leab, "See it Now: A Legend Reassessed," in American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past, by John E. O'Conner (Ed.), (New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1987), 19.
The concept of just what "controversy" on television means is, itself, controversial, and is subject to analysis in the same way that the definition of "news" can be different from culture to culture.
Barnouw makes the point that Murrow's sponsor, Alcoa, was exhibiting exceptional bravery in allowing Murrow to challenge McCarthy. But why should criticism "depend on the appearance of a courageous sponsor?"
See Erik Barnouw, The sponsor, 52.
See also: J. Fred MacDonald, Television and The Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam. (New York: Praeger, 1985).
See Fred MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace.
Quotations were taken from a recent study made of the popular American news program with an "in depth" format on ABC, Nightline. The study was made by William Hoynes and David Croteau at Boston College's Sociology Department. After an examination of the guest list for all of Nightline's 865 programs over a forty month period (January 1, 1985 - April 30, 1988), the researchers identified the most frequent guests to be Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams and Jerry Falwell. Also discovered was that 89 percent of the US guests were men, 92 percent were white, and 80 percent were professionals, government officials, or corporate representatives.
In fact, Herman and Chomsky took the phrase, "manufacturing conscent" from Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, written in 1922. The muckrakers also used this approach to explain the influence, mostly by the big combines of the turn of the last century on public opinion.
See also: Noam Chomsky's speech,"20th Century American Propaganda: A Brief History of US Corporate and Government Propaganda Operations" which was delivered in March, 1991, by Chomsky at the College of Marin in Kentfield. (To be found in the IGC computer network's conference propaganda.rev.)
J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda and American Ideological Critique," in James. A. Anderson (ed.), Communication Yearbook/14 (Newbury Park: Sage Publications), 1991, 213-216.
In a radio interview (transcribed and posted to the Internet newsgroup alt.war.vietnam, Mon Aug 1 12:45:26 eet= 1994) Chomsky was asked: "In what ways was Marx significant for the developement of your views?" His answer was:

Not very much. I find much of the Marxist literature rather boring, frankly, and I am far from a Marx scholar. I've been much interested in the left Marxist tradition: Pannekoek, Korsch, Luxemburg, Mattick. And I have read Marx selectively. I don't try to keep up with the current literature, with Marxology. Sometimes there are things written by particular people that I find interesting, but as an intellectual tradition, I don't find it very exciting. ...If a person adopts some kind of central doctrine, whether it's political or religious, they lose all recourse to free thought. It may be necessary to identify a group of ideas which have commonalities under a specific label, but I can't understand why someone would adopt it as law.

J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda and American Ideological Critique,", 216, 218-219.
J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda and American Ideological Critique,", 229.
Philip Bonosky, The Background to American Literature Since the War (Potsdam, 1967), 22.
Usually, it is the German or Soviet models which come to mind when we think of propaganda. Compare, for example, Sinclair Lewis' picture of fascism in America during the 1930s in his play, It Can't Happen Here, (New York: New American Library), 1970.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 86-87.
Perhaps this would also be a good definition for Sproule's term, "polemical propaganda." See J. Michael Sproule, "Propaganda and American Ideological Critique,", 229.
(See appendix for an example of a CNN news abstract illustrating commercial television's structure.)
If "propaganda" is the right word to use in the above context, then some mention should also be made of the concept of "friendly fascism." It is interesting to see how liberal criticism of big business in American society continues in the same strain as that of the muckrakers a hundred years earlier. Bertram Gross, for example, formerly of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, warns, in his book, Friendly Fascism (South End Press, 1982) of a new kind of fascism in America, one in which:

...the concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership...leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase 'friendly fascism' helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the unfriendly present of the dependent fascism propped up by the US government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

Classic fascism uses the iron heel, much like that described by Jack London in his novel of the same name -- an earlier warning about fascism coming to America, among many. But in contrast to Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, a friendly fascist would "erect a shield of legitimacy to cloak the illegitimate... conspicuous public leadership would become a form of followership."

According to Noam Chomsky (Interviewed in Frontline magazine, March 2-15, 1991, 86-95:

Somebody has got to control and subdue the Third World--the industrial countries understand that--you have to keep them under control, you have to block independent nationalism, you have to make sure they are readily exploitable.

For the US, its comparative advantage in the world is essentially its monopoly of force, and therefore the natural posture for it to adopt is that of a mercenary state. ...This policy, incidentally, was pretty explicit in the 1950s and you can actually read it in the declassified secret documents of both Britain and the US in the 1950s. Now it is much broader.

Again disciplined intellectuals do not look at these questions, because they are just much too revealing, they tell you too much about the truth. But for anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the Gulf today the first thing to look at is the declassified record of secret documents of Britain and the US in the 1950s. They are now more or less open. There has been a lot of censorship but there are a lot of them that are available and they are very clear.