Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities β for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
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