Top Highlights

• The public relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so they can claim attention as news.
• In recent times, the persistent belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was ineligible to become President, offers a prime example of the extent to which the assertion of “startling facts” can become and remain news for years—even when empirical evidence demonstrates that these facts are wholly fictitious...
• In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar “global media event,” when he dreamed up “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” a world-wide celebratory spectacle honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored—behind the scenes—by the General Electric Corporation.
• his seminal 1947 article, “The Engineering of Consent,”
• the “herd instinct,” the unceasing need to gain the approval and camaraderie of the social group.