Although William Lederer's A Nation of Sheep was published in 1961, its concepts are just as relevant to American politics almost four decades later. The American public continues to be misinformed on foreign policy matters. As the world becomes more globally interdependent, the average American clings to a narrow set of domestic interests. This parochialism allows the U.S. government to use skillful means of publicity to persuade the public on important foreign issues.
One of the glaring examples that Lederer provides of the U.S. government's persuasive powers is its near invasion of Laos during the summer of 1959. The government and the media were duped by the Laotian government into believing that foreign Communist troops had invaded its northern border. The Laotians, fearful that the U.S. was preparing to reduce foreign aid, fabricated the whole story using American diplomatic channels and the American press to spread the news. These rumors took on a life of their own as senior U.S. officials corroborated the story, despite the fact that there were no U.S. eyewitnesses to the invasion: "The truth is that the U.S. government was in almost total ignorance of the facts" (Lederer, 1961, p. 25). The deception was discovered months later, when U.S. journalists and a United Nations team finally visited the area where the "invasion" occurred.
How was the U.S. government able to influence American public opinion based on such haphazard information? The government had source credibility in its favor: "affiliating with a positively evaluated source is reinforcing" (Brewer and Crano, 1994, p. 44). The sources the government relied on supposedly had expertise and were trustworthy. In formulating its foreign policy, the U.S. government relies on five sources: trusted local officials, the local media, paid local informers, personal observations by U.S. representatives, and American journalists (Lederer, 1961, p. 96). In the...