Don't forget about

> "The Engineering of Consent" is an essay by Edward Bernays first published in 1947,

"Inventing Reality" by Michael Parenti is another book on the subject.

barthes mythologies

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

Simulacra and Simulation. And other works by Jean Baudrillard. His philosophy focuses on the unreal nature of contemporary culture due to mass communication and mass consumption.

“Crystallizing Public Opinion” (1923) is another important Bernays text.

And he surely knows what he is talking about.

"Die vierte Gewalt – Wie Mehrheitsmeinung gemacht wird, auch wenn sie keine ist"

https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/richard-david-precht-hara...

Richard David Precht is a poor caricature of a French public intellectual figure and loves to create outrage to stay relevant. He lives off the same mainstream media that he criticizes.

Precht doesn't seem particularly French to me. He is a solid craftsman. I associate French intellectuals more with esprit and a certain craziness.

His earlier books had a slightly penetrating American style, popular science peppered with human interest stories.

Precht, however, is willing to make himself unpopular, but he is also one of the few intellectuals who can afford to do so. Many media workers probably don't like to read how strong the pressure to conform is, they prefer to suppress that.

The Century of Self is a BBC documentary about Bernays and his propaganda models. It's quite good and available on yt.

Watch everything by Adam Curtis. Century of the Self, The Trap and The Power of Nightmares specifically.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0193231/

Suspiciously absent from every streaming service over here. But at least Century of the Self has been uploaded to Youtube.