The United Fruit Company owned around forty percent of the arable land in Guatemala, most of it uncultivated, and paid taxes on the valuations it had itself declared. When Jacobo Árbenz's land reform expropriated uncultivated holdings and offered compensation at those declared valuations, the company objected that the figure was too low.
Its response had two halves. One was in Washington, where its lawyers and its board had close connections to the Dulles brothers. The other was Edward Bernays.
Bernays's campaign ran from around 1950. Its instruments were journalism rather than advertising.
He organized press trips to Guatemala for American editors and reporters, arranged and guided by the company, in which the itinerary and the interlocutors were selected. He established the Middle America Information Bureau, which presented itself as a neutral source of regional information and issued material to newspapers. He fed stories to editors he knew, framing Guatemala's land reform as a Soviet beachhead in the hemisphere. He arranged for academics and commentators to receive material.
The coverage that resulted — in the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Time, and elsewhere — was not bought. It was reported, in good faith, by journalists whose access to the country and whose framing of its politics had been arranged by an interested party.
The mechanism is availability. Tversky and Kahneman's account holds that the probability of an event is judged by how easily instances come to mind, and Bernays's campaign made one interpretation of Guatemala cognitively effortless. An editor in New York in 1953 asked what is happening in Guatemala and had ready to hand a set of vivid communist-menace images, and nothing else.
The sleeper effect supplied the second half. Where the material's origin was known, the discounting attached to the source decayed faster than the content, and the content remained.
By 1954 the policy community in Washington believed there was a consensus about Guatemala. There was, and it had been purchased.
The coup, PBSuccess, ran in June 1954 and is chapter 229. What this chapter adds is that the covert operation and the information campaign were separate enterprises with the same objective, and that the second had been running for four years before the first began.
Bernays wrote about the Guatemala work in his memoirs as a professional accomplishment.
Cross-ref: Attack — Never Let Them See the Source