censorship

George Orwell wrote: "literary censorship ... is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban." One means of silencing challenges to orthodoxy is that the press is in the hands of "wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics," and to silence unwelcome voices. A second device is a good education, which instills the "general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact."
p.163

The project of keeping the public uninformed, passive, and obedient traces far back in history, but constantly takes new forms. That is particularly true when people win a degree of freedom, and cannot so easily be subdued by the threat or exercise of violence.
p. 179

In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson established the country's first official propaganda agency, called the Committe on Public Information ... its task was to turn a pacifist population into hysterical jingoists and enthusiasts for war ... These efforts had enormous success, including scandalous fabrications that were exposed long after they had done their work, and often persisted even after exposure ...
p. 179

Edward Bernays - one of the founders of the PR industry - "it was the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibility of regimenting the public mind."
p. 180

These mechanisms of regimentation of minds are "a new art in the practice of democracy". Walter Lippmann - most eminent figure of the century in American journalism.  
p. 180

The business world and the elite intellectuals were concerned with the same problem. "The bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people," Bernays observed. As a result of "universal suffrage and universal schooling ... the masses promised to become king" - a dangerous tendency that could be controlled and reversed by new methods "to mold the mind of the masses" Bernays advised.
p.180

From "The Secular Priesthood and the Perils of Democracy"
in Noam Chomsky  2002 "On Nature and Language" edited by A Belletti & L Rizzi
UK Cambridge