Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files. TV.

It's been estimated that an average American living in cities sees up to 4,000 ads a day.

Ads are everywhere you look, subways, bus stops, billboards, magazines.

This toxic culture of mindless consumption exploits our innermost insecurities and desires to meet impossible standards.

The corporate PR machine is enormously successful due to a model created by a man

named Edward Bernays nearly a century ago. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays, is considered

the father of modern propaganda, or public relations. An Austrian aristocrat, Bernays's first

contribution to the United States was helping President Woodrow Wilson sell the idea of World War I as a noble mission to spread democracy in Europe.

In order to create the engineering of consent, Bernays argued, you must appeal to the unconscious mind.

And on behalf of numerous corporate clients, Bernays helped perfect the tools of manipulation

and conditioning that are used today. To understand more about the history of propaganda and the

collusion between the U.S. Empire and Fourth Estate, I talked to professor of media studies at New York

University, Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote the intro to the new edition of

Bernay's 1928 seminal book, Propaganda.

When did public opinion begin to stand out as a force to be managed by the establishment?

For all intents and purposes, I think it's probably most accurate to say that World War I

marked an important turning point

in the rise of what we call public opinion as a consideration for political leaders

and the science of propaganda, which was used and has been used with increasing sophistication to move public

opinion in certain directions, basically to make sure that we don't succumb to anything

like real democracy.

I mean, public opinion has to be respected, but not out of any respect for the popular

...