Bernays and Lippmann Assignment

These are two very different articles on a somewhat similar idea. Each looks at rhetoric and persuasion in a very different way:

Bernays: Clearly, Bernays believes in the ability of people to influence major decisions. The hat example he gave was very effective, especially as he broke the situation down step-by-step to show how the people involved in it worked to "persuade" the country that large, fancy hats were fashionable. I worked in a public relations office for a semester, and while the steps that the hat industry took don't seem so amazing now, it must have been quite an impressive achievement at that time, especially with organizing all the committees and fashion shows. It makes me think about when I want to buy something that I see on TV. Am I being manipulated or persuaded? There's a very thin line between the two. Anyway, Bernays's article was fairly easy to read, and, I think, he was saying that the ability to manipulate the public is not only a valuable tool, but a necessary one.

Lippmann: Hmm. Times haven't changed much. There are still huge amounts of people who don't go to the polls, and many of them give the exact same reasons that Lippmann cited. When Lippmann states that he has never met a person who embodied the ideal of an informed citizen, I just thought, "Well, duh." I mean, everyone knows that there are people in this country who ignore what's going on in the world and prefer to concentrate on who got booted off the "Survivor" island the night before. Maybe the idea of the "ideal citizen" was still in wide circulation then, but it's certainly not now. Maybe I'm just a cynic.