The Engineering of Consent Bv EDWARD L. BERNAYS
FREEDOM of speech and its demo- cratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion. This development was an inevitable result of the expansion of the media of free speech and persuasion, denned in other articles in this volume. All these media provide open doors to the public mind. Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens.
The tremendous expansion of com- munications in the United States has given this Nation the world's most pene- trating and effective apparatus for the transmission of ideas. Every resident is constantly exposed to the impact of our vast network of communications which reach every corner of the coun- try, no matter how remote or isolated. Words hammer continually at the eyes and ears of America. The United States has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times.
Knowledge of how to use this enor- mous amplifying system becomes a matter of primary concern to those who are interested in socially constructive action.
There are two main divisions of this communications system which maintain social cohesion. On the first level there are the commercial media. Almost 1,800 daily newspapers in the United States have a combined circulation of around 44,000,000. There are approximately 10,000 weekly newspapers and almost 6,000 magazines. Approximately 2,000
pamphlets is published annually. The country is blanketed with billboards, handbills, throwaways, and direct mail advertising. Round tables, panels and forums, classrooms and legislative as- semblies, and public platforms—any and all media, day after day, spread the word, someone's word.
On the second level there are the spe- cialized media owned and operated by the many organized groups in this coun- try. Almost all such groups (and many of their subdivisions) have their own communications systems. They dis- seminate ideas not only by means of the formal written word in labor papers, house organs, special bulletins, and the like, but also through lectures, meetings, discussions, and rank-and-file conversa- tions.
LEADERSHIP THROUGH COMMUNICATION
This web of communications, some- times duplicating, crisscrossing, and overlapping, is a condition of fact, not theory. We must recognize the sig- nificance of modern communications not only as a highly organized mechanical web but as a potent force for social good or possible evil. We can deter- mine whether this network shall be em- ployed to its greatest extent for sound social ends.
For only by mastering the techniques of communication can leadership be exercised fruitfully in the vast complex that is modern democracy in the United States. In an earlier age, in a soci- ety that was small geographically and with a more homogeneous population, a leader was usually known to his fol- lowers personally; there was a visual relationship between them.
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