Consider This A Dropped Jewel: The Television & Advertising Bamboozle

“News has become entertainment. Television is the main source of news, and only real purpose of any commercial televison program is to deliver an audience to advertisers.

The programs and the advertisements become indistinguishable, both serving the purpose of massaging the viewer into the mood to consume. If there were no such thing as official U.S. government propaganda, America would still be in the grip of the most powerful propaganda apparatus in human history: the advertising industry. Advertising is not usually thought of as propaganda, because it has no obvious political slant. All the better to brainwash you with. In fact, advertising sells a political ideology as fully developed and as potent as anything...The ideology is consumerism.

There are tow types of propaganda identified by Jacques Ellul, whose book ‘Propaganda’ is a definitive work on the subject. There is propaganda of integration (sociological propaganda) and propaganda of agitation (political propaganda). Advertising is both. It presents a coherent set of values and standards, which serves the purpose of molding (integrating) disparate ‘propagandees’ into a coherent group with shared ideals- in this case, the equation of happiness with consumer products. And it ‘agitates’ its targets into performing specific acts for the benefit of the political system- namely, purchasing things, an act without which industrial capitalism, our political system, would perish.

Conflation of advertising and propaganda spawns USC professors Ian Mitroff’s and Warren Bennis’s book title, ‘The Unreality Industry.’ The advertising and entertainment industries have teamed up to instill America with a culture based upon outright falsehoods and manipulations of fact. We worship celebrities whose public personas bear little relationship to their real identities, then we purchase products designed to make us identify with the artificial celebrities. The process perpetuates until we’re living in a mirage. Or perhaps it’s more like a hologram because the illusion is deliberately created.

What becomes of our own identities in this haze of consumption? We lose them, as we submerge ourselves into the mass culture. Striving to create ourselves in the images presented to us by advertising, we lose touch with reality.” From, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes” By: Jonathan Vankin