Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media [Paperback]

This is for the interested kid or student or person inclined towards radical politics who maybe doesn't have a Phd degree, or who doesn't sit around discussing the scholarly implications of books for the sake of showing off their superior intellect.

First of all, don't be scaired by the 400 pages of the book. Its actually just barely above 300, with about 100 pages of appendixes and footnotes.

It is a very readable book for anyone who has at least a vague idea of recent world affairs (of the past 3 decades or so). And even if you don't have much familiarity, after finishing this book, you certainly will. Some parts may be a bit overwhelming, but they are few and far between.

The basic premise of the book is that the mainstream American corporate media (the big networks, the big newspapers, news magazines, etc)serve to uphold the interests of the elites in this country (political and economic). Chomsky and Herman acknowledge that we do have a "liberal" press, (what does it really mean to be 'liberal' in America today anyways?), but that the liberalness is kept within acceptable boundaries. Basically, the mainstream press may give a liberal slant on what the dominant institutions and systems are doing...but they will not question the very nature of the institutions and systems themselves.

For example, today's Los Angeles Times (January 6,2003) had a page 2 story on the U.N sanctions against Iraq. Now, the typical reader may see the story, and figure that since the LA Times is even reporting on the impact of sanctions against Iraqi civillians, this is demonstrative of their 'liberal' leanings. However, the story leaves untouched the most crucial issues regarding UN sanctions against Iraq, such as:
1)the U.S. and U.K. are the sole countries who sit on the UN Secutity Council who refuse to lift the sanctions against Iraq, despite the pleas of the other member nations (such as Russia, France, China, etc).
2)UN estimates have put the death toll from the sanctions at nearly one million civillians.
3)Two consecutive UN Humanitarian Coordinators have resigned in the past five years in protest of the effect of the sanctions, with the first stating "We are in the process of destroying an entire society."

Basically, the mainstream corporatized press will leave the most crucial questions unanswered, if they portray American power in a bad light.

The last chapter on Laos and Cambodia are a bit tedious and confusing, but by the time you get to that chapter, the previous ones will have more than made their case.

Overall, this is an excellent book, even for the non-academic, and will fundamentally alter the way you look at the media, and the 'facts' they are reporting.

Obviously, not all happenings in the world can fit between the covers of the New York Times. Herman and Chomsky outline five filters, interrelated to some extent, through which these events must pass in order to become newsworthy. First, huge transnational businesses own much of the media - a fact probably more true now than in 1988 with Disney, Westinghouse, and Microsoft bullying in on the news markets. The corporate interests of these companies need not, and probably do not, coincide with the public's interests, and, consequently, some news and some interpretations of news stories critical of business interests will probably not make it to press.

Secondly, since advertising is crucial to keeping subscription costs low, media will shape their news away from serious investigative documentaries to more entertaining revues in order to keep viewer or reader interest and will cater to the audience to which the advertising is directed; before advertising became central to keeping a paper competitive, working class papers, for example, were much more prevalent, leading to a much broader range of interpretations of events (and thus more room for a reader to make up his own mind) than can be found by perusing the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe.

Thirdly, media depend crucially on sources and these sources will inescapably have their own agendas. Reliability of information should be important (although it may not be as shown by the tabloidization of the mass media in Monica Lewinsky affair), but the press also needs a steady stream of events to make into news. This leads to a reliance on the public relations bureaucracies of government and corporate agencies for whom some measure of accepted credibility exists and who will also probably have a statement about major happenings. However, by relying substantially on the statements these parties, the media becomes less an investigative body and more a megaphone for propaganda; independent confirmation of facts as well as interpretation eludes it.

Fourthly, there are costs to producing an incendiary news item -- one which attacks powerful interests whether they be advertisers, government agencies, corporate bodies, or public interest groups. According to the previous three filters, the media relies on these interests for its survival and cannot afford their sustained censure. While none of these filters guarantee that a news item attacking one of these interested parties will not appear, the story is likely to be spun in a way to minimize fallout or flak which may compromise its integrity.

Since they wrote at the end of the Reagan years, Herman and Chomsky's final filter is anti-communism, but it may be any prevailing ideology. The assumptions behind ideologies, almost by definition, are rarely challenged; ideologies organize the world, constructing frames into which news events can be placed for easy interpretation: Communism is evil; the domino effect is an actual phenomenon; America is right. This past February there was no hint in the domestic press that there could be any response to Iraq's intransigence other than bombing, making the contrary opinions of the vast majority of the world unintelligible. In domestic affairs, article after article praises various organizations on increasing the diversity of their membership -- diversity being always ethnic and racial diversity without ever asking why racial and ethnic diversity is necessarily relevant in the first place (as opposed to diversity of political opinion, for example).

Mark Twain said, "It was a narrow escape. If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism." Manufacturing Consent asks us to challenge our assumptions about the way the world works, urges us to conscientiously separate the agendas behind the news we consume from the facts within, and demonstrates the danger of a monopolistic media cartel to purported American ideals of popular governance. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to break out of the flock and construct her own informed opinions about world affairs.

The book comes in three sections: A propaganda model, a review of "alignment" news stories, and coverage of the Indochina wars. The propaganda model is fairly simple. The mainstream news sources are corporate entities with a set of built-in limitations. Reporters need to serve their government sources or they'll be out of the loop. Editors and owners will be watching for stories that slant the wrong way (too pro-union, for example). Meanwhile, freelance "flak" providers raise the red flag when a reporter --- or newspaper or TV channel --- is straying from the path of orthodoxy.

During the Cold War, communism was used to keep the media in line. If you stray, you might be labeled a commie or a socialist. These terms changed to "liberal" during the late 1980s (and became institutionalized in the 1990s). The words are different, but the effect is the same. Chomsky has said in interviews that the emphasis on painting reporters as "reds" was too specific --- flak doesn't have to take the form of red-baiting. (The references in the book on this topic feel a little dated.)

The second section is a collection of case studies in alignment: The media adopts a pro-US stance when covering foreign elections, demonizing official enemies, and counting victims from wars, massacres, and human rights violations. The case studies are over ten years old, but they still resonate today. Change the names of the countries from, say, Guatemala to Iraq and you have the same story: Reporters stay aligned with US policy by limiting their criticism to official enemies.

The third section is an in-depth study of the media's coverage of wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This is the best part of the book. To say that these two authors know this subject is an understatement. They go through one story after another, showing how the media colluded with the US government to carry out a murderous, imperialist war against a peasant population. The war was ugly, and the atrocities had to be whitewashed to keep it going. Chomsky and Herman have made a major contribution here. This section is required reading for anyone who wants to know what really happened in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book ends with a Chomsky/Herman trademark: A mass of footnotes. Track down these sources and you'll learn even more, or just read the extra bits of information tucked into each footnote. (There are a number of references to unpublished papers by Alex Carey. These papers were later collected in a book called Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. That book is an essential part of Herman and Chomsky's critique.)

If you want to understand the news media in the US, you should take a look at Manufacturing Consent. Herman and Chomsky make a case that is hard to refute. They discard to arguments over liberal versus conservative and get to the heart of the matter. Read this and you'll never watch the news the same way again.