Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

Edward Bernays,” examines how both fields claimed that they werepertinent because they provided vital renditions of the truth. Throughout the 1920s, Bernays, a veteran of the CPI’s efforts, asserted in books, speeches, magazine articles, and news interviews the highly controversial claim that the emerging PR industry’s use of propaganda was a social good. He maintained in his book Propaganda (1928) that propaganda served society by showcasing unexplored minority ideas—new truths that the press could not be trusted to uncover adequately on its own. The press attacked Bernays’ claims as disingenuous, and, in the process, journalism became even more convinced of the need for professionalism as a way to protect its claim to provide the most credible version of truth. However, while the press continued to assert this professional stance of open hostility toward PR, it was becoming increasingly comfortable with using the information and sources provided by the rising PR industry. These developments illustrate fundamental, early iterations of journalism’s double-mindedness regarding systemic, domestic propaganda.

Within a decade of the appearance of Bernays’ book, overt press resistance to propaganda began to ebb. Chapter 5, “Press Acclimatization to Propaganda: The NAM Free Enterprise Campaign,” explores how the press, through its sense of self-assured professionalism, accommodated propaganda materials. This chapter reveals evidence of this dynamic by examining the National Association of Manufacturers’ (NAM) campaign for free enterprise. By the late 1930s the country was struggling with the aftereffects of the depression, and big business felt besieged by the Roosevelt administration’s interventionism in the corporate sphere. Alarmed, NAM initiated a campaign to propagandize Americans about the benefits of capitalism; the association found a journalism field that displayed little compunction about using the proffered material as news. This chapter explores how the professionalized press failed to grapple with news operations’ own proclivity for using these propaganda materials—especially news releases, prepackaged news columns, and expert sources. Professional journalism’s scientific orientation toward news, with its preference for expertly constructed information, made the press vulnerable to propaganda that extolled business as the source of true societal leadership