Someone knows of Edward Benays... I'm impressed! Yes, ten years ago I thought Tom Hanks could have been president some day. He had the common touch, made the right movies, and apparently kept his political opinion to himself. His choices in movies spoke for him. It seems that Mr. Hanks, who is related to Abraham Lincoln's mother, has been doing a brilliant acting job. Maybe Hollywood should start a new Oscar category, "Greatest Performance in Real Life". Hanks would have some stiff competition with Barack, Sharpton, most journalists.
Robert DeNiro is the latest victim (?). He goes to a Obama fund raiser and tells an offcolor (racist) joke and he reveals himself to be an idiot. It wasn't funny, it was just stupid, and DeNiro didn't realize it...until he got thrown under that awfully crowded bus.
Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn
I first learned about Edward Bernays because of Glenn Beck's novel "The Overton Window"; one of the central characters was loosely based on Bernays.
One of Bernay's public relations campaigns was to get women to smoke cigarettes. This paragraph from Wikipedia doesn't mention it but I think part of Bernay's strategy was to exploit the phallic symbolism of the cigarette; sort of based on the Freudian theory of penis envy.
One of the most famous campaigns of Bernays was the women's
cigarette smoking campaign in 1920s. Bernays helped the smoking industry overcome one of the biggest social taboos of the time: women smoking in public (Stuart Ewen, Hunter College). Women were only allowed to smoke in designated areas, or not at all. If caught violating this rule, women would have been arrested. Bernays staged the 1929
Easter parade in
New York City, showing models holding lit
Lucky Strike cigarettes, or
"Torches of Freedom". After the historical public event, women started lighting up more than ever before. It was through Bernays that women's smoking habits started to become socially acceptable. Bernays created this event as news, which, of course, it wasn’t. Bernays convinced industries that the news, not advertising, was the best medium to carry their message to an unsuspecting public.[
citation needed]