Walter Lippmann coined the phrase "manufacture of consent" to describe a shift in how democracies are actually run: not by informing citizens but by managing what they believe their interests to be. This film traces that idea back to 1917, when Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to build American support for entering World War I. Under George Creel the CPI relied on crude exaggeration and outright falsehood, but one of its staffers, Edward Bernays, took a different approach, studying crowd psychology and shaping a campaign around the line that America was fighting to "make the world safe for democracy." The film uses Lippmann's own writing and the CPI's wartime record to argue that Bernays' methods, not Creel's, became the template for modern public relations and political messaging. It treats Lippmann not as an outside observer but as a practitioner who helped design the system he was describing, and asks what it means for a democracy to be governed through manufactured belief rather than open argument.