ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical and international propagation of Committee on Public Information (CPI) influence into the present day. It focuses on the contributions of specific people who were part of or influenced by the CPI rather than, say, the systematic development of theory and practice across the fields of advertising, public relations, public diplomacy, organisational communication, and so on. In the global spread of the CPI's techniques, the overarching theme and backdrop is "national" strategy in the classic sense of the word that implies an enemy to be beaten. Walter Lippmann set the ambivalent tone for post-war communication studies in 1922 with his Public Opinion, which James Carey rightly calls "the originating book in the modern history of communication research'. Edward Bernays is probably best known and most obviously influential member of the CPI. Harold Lasswell is foremost of second-generation CPI theorists. Paul Lazarsfeld belongs to the age of radio and was the first theorist of instantaneous mass communication.
