Propaganda, American-style

Pointing to the massive amounts of propaganda spewed by government and institutions around the world, observers have called our era the age of Orwell. But the fact is that Orwell was a latecomer on the scene. As early as the First World War, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out the task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state policy. In this instance, the U.S. government wanted to silence opposition to the war. This represents a version of Orwell's 1984, even before Orwell was writing.

In 1921, the famous American journalist Walter Lippman said that the art of democracy requires what he called the "manufacture of consent". This phrase is an Orwellian euphemism for thought control. The idea is that in a state such as the U.S. where the government can't control the people by force, it had better control what they think...
The Soviet Union was at the opposite end of the spectrum from us in its domestic freedoms. It's essentially a country run by the bludgeon. It's easy to determine what propaganda was in the USSR: what the state produced was propaganda.
That's the kind of thing that Orwell described in 1984. One of the reasons why 1984 is such a popular book is that it's trivial, and once attacked the enemies of the U.S. If Orwell had dealt with a different problem, themselves - ourselves - his book wouldn't have been as popular as it is. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been published.
In totalitarian societies where there's a Ministry of Truth, propaganda doesn't really try to control your thoughts. It just gives you the party line. It says "Here's the official doctrine; don't disobey and you won't get in trouble. What you think is not of great importance to anyone. If you get out of line we'll do something to you because we have force."
Democratic societies can't work like that, because the state is much more limited in its capacity to control behaviour by force. Since the voice of the people is allowed to speak out, those in power better control what that voice says - in other words, control what people think. One of the ways to do this is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but actually stays within narrow margins. You have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions - and that those assumptions are the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accept the propaganda system, the debate is permissible.

It is somewhat disturbing, isn't it?
Can we ever be sure about knowing anything that is not distorted?
Every peremisis we are basing our view of the world on comes from somewhere, right? Well, who is it that presents this information to us, and with what intent?