Though it would be tempting to think that Joseph Goebbels, notorious Minister of Propaganda for Hitler's Third Reich, invented the co-option of the mass media for propaganda dissemination, it would be wrong. That honor more probably belongs to America's own President Woodrow Wilson.
To win his first term as President, Wilson promised to keep America out of the impending Great War in Europe. But in 1916, the President decided that if he wanted a seat at the negotiations when the war finally ended -- basically so he could promote his League of Nations scheme -- then America needed to be in the war. So he employed famed New York Times journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays to develop techniques to influence public opinion in favor of entering the war.
They did and America did.
The rest is history. In fact, Wilson, Lippman, Bernays, et al, were so successful that two up-and-coming political leaders took note of their methods and put them to good use just a couple of decades later. Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler pushed the propaganda envelope, so to speak, but they owed much to the Wilson-Lippman model -- even down to daily talking points on the issues and conference calls between the government and the news organizations. Much like today.
Blessings,
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