“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy

and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the

propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not

foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western

capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass

communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the

true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally

irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's

almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Aldous Huxley 1959