They could go all the way back to the lending of Ivy Lee to Hitler to help the Nazis help set up their propaganda machine! Ivy Lee, the father of spin would be proud of the Bush Propagandists! Mr Lee was a VERY close friend and employee of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman bank! Presscott and friends loaned him to their business partner Adolf Hitler is how the story goes!
"Despots R Us"
"In 1934 the German Dye Trust retained public-relations pioneer Ivy Lee for $25,000 a year, ostensibly to promote the company's image in the United States. Lee's true client, though, was Adolf Hitler's regime, and his aim was to favorably influence American public opinion of the Third Reich. As part of his work, Lee produced a report suggesting that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop "undertake a definitive campaign to clarify the American mind" via newspaper op-eds and radio addresses to the U.S. public.
Lee's arrangement was ultimately exposed, and the incident helped lead Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 1938. FARA required that representatives of foreign governments disclose their client list, the thinking apparently being that lobbyists would find it too embarrassing to work for dictatorial regimes if they knew that their activities would be made public. It was a strategy of name and shame, and in some places it could have worked. Washington, unfortunately, was not one of them. From the apartheid regime in South Africa to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, foreign tyrants have had little trouble finding friends in the capital, whatever good intentions lay behind FARA. "Jeffrey Dahmer had a lawyer, and every country with a terrible human-rights record has someone in Washington to try to get them out of the soup," says a senior congressional aide who is frequently buttonholed by foreign lobbyists. "If you have the money, you can hire yourself representation."
http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/12/silverstein-k.htmlManaging the Human Herd
These influences culminate with Bernays, who happened to be a double nephew of Sigmund Freud. (His mother was Freud's sister; his father was Freud's wife's brother.) Bernays combined Le Bon's fear of the masses with the theories of Freud and others regarding the subconscious, irrational motivations of human behavior. In books titled Crystallizing Public Opinion, Engineering Consent and Propaganda, he defined public relations as an "applied social science" which society's masters could use to manage the human herd. "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind," he argued, it would be possible to "control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it. . . . Theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline."
This is scary stuff, and required reading if you want to understand what motivates U.S. businesses to spend over $10 billion a year on PR. But it should be read for what it is--marketing hype, using reverent technocratic imagery to package Bernays' services to his corporate clients as the latest shiny new must-have gizmo.
Lee's "statement of principles" was designed to create the public myth that PR is natural, honorable and honest--part of the "two-way street" process of democratic communications between businesses and their "publics." Bernays' created an equal and opposite corporate myth--that public opinion could be manufactured for a price, bought and sold like any other commodity. Ewen easily debunks Lee's mythology, and he properly deplores the elitism in Bernays. He fails, however, to deal with or even mention the fact that Bernays was a controversial and frequently disliked figure within the PR industry--a man who was not invited to parties, who was deliberately excluded from professional associations, and who had a problem keeping clients.
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1996Q4/ewen.htmlPlenty of info on Ivy Leadbetter Lee on the WWW!
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