Obama got it wrong in his second sentence:

[OnyxCollie]

27. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by Noam Chomsky

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by Noam Chomsky (talk delivered at the University of Wisconsin - Madison)

If you go back to the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences published in 1933 -- days when people were a little more open and honest in what they said -- there's an article on propaganda, and it's well worth reading. There's an entry under propaganda. The entry is written by a leading- one- maybe the leading American political scientist, Harold Lasswell, who was very influential, particularly in this area, communications, and so on. And in this entry in the International Encyclopedia on propaganda he says, we should not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. They're not, he said. Even with the rise of mass education- doesn't mean that people can judge their own interests. They can't. The best judges of their interests are elites -- the specialized class, the cool observers, the people who have rationality -- and therefore they must be granted the means to impose their will. Notice, for the common good. Because, again, because- well, he says, because of the ignorance and superstition of the masses, he said it's necessary to have a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda. Propaganda, he says, we shouldn't have a negative connotation about, it's neutral. Propaganda, he says, is as neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good, you can use it for bad; since were good people, obviously, -- that's sort of true by definition -- we'll use it for good purposes, and there should be no negative connotations about that. In fact, it's moral to use it, because that's the only way that you can save the ignorant and stupid masses of the population from their own errors. You don't let a three year old run across the street, and you don't let ordinary people make their own decisions. You have to control them.

And why do you need propaganda? Well, he explains that. He says, in military-run or feudal societies -- what we would these days call totalitarian societies -- you don't really need propaganda that much. And the reason is you've got a- you've got a club in your hand. You can control the way people behave, and therefore it doesn't matter much what they think, because if they get out of line you can control them -- for their own good, of course. But once you lose the club, you know, once the State loses its capacity to coerce by force, then you have some problems. The voice of the people is heard -- you've got all these formal mechanisms around that permit people to express themselves, and even participate, and vote, and that sort of thing -- and you can't control them by force, because you've lost that capacity. But the voice of the people is heard, and therefore you've got to make sure it says the right thing. And in order to make sure it says the right thing, you've got to have effective and sophisticated propaganda, again, for their own good.