April 1st 1957: the day Western mainstream media officially became masters of propaganda through a seemingly innocent April Fools' Day joke
In 1957,
BBC conducted a very interesting experiment. The spaghetti-tree
hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on
April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama,
purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting
spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree".
At the
time spaghetti was relatively little known in the UK, so that many
Britons were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a
number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing
their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast
"the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever
pulled".
This
'innocent' farce showed dramatically the unimaginable power of TV and
the mainstream media to shape massively the minds of millions.
Earlier, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays had set
the foundations of modern propaganda.
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