The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Manufacturing Consent

I am kicking myself for missing the deadline of the Kindle return policy. I'm only about 20% of the way through this book and while they do make valid points and have plenty of information to back their claims what kills the book is the author's tone (particularly using Latin and other pretentious wording to reassure the reader of how extra intelligent this guy is) and employing similar tactics of bias, manipulation, and carefully ignoring certain information to give readers the wrong impression of key events. During the case study of the Polish Priest Jerzy Popieluszko in "Worthy and Unworthy Victims" the wording is in such a way that would suggest Poland had its own government in 1984 which is flat out wrong they were still a Soviet Socialist Republic (meaning they still had to answer to Moscow). Poland didn't make gains in ruling itself until 1989 and 1991 when the USSR finally fell.

The book is worth 5 stars just for the fact it shows corporate and government connections that bred a conflict of interest with news media and entertainment producers but the tone, attitude, and suspicious writing style of the author seriously hurts this book.

This is a seminal text to understanding media manipulation and subtle governmental forces. Despite being written in the 1980s, the book is more relevant and important than ever. Herman and Chomsky masterfully introduced a new "propaganda model," which proposed that the government and media work together -- more than they even understand.

The entire premise rests on an idea of worthy and unworthy victims. For instance, communists in Latin countries and Indochina are vilified by governmental forces. These regimes are seen as dangerous, genocidal, and wanton (some may be), but in general they seem to be opposed to Western overrule. In turn, media subtly falls in line, posing worthy and unworthy deaths, leaders, and wars. Through a series of real-life examples, Herman and Chomsky exemplified the role and cost of media's complacency and acceptance of governmental truths.

The propaganda model puts forth four main elements: 1) a frame (perspective) is created; 2) there's a campaign to share the frame; 3) other frames are ignored, negated, and reduced; 4) "facts" are selected. Surprisingly, some the store.com reviewers have noted that the book feels dated -- I had the exact opposite reaction. "Manufacturing Consent (Content)" feels freshly polished and even applicable to our current society. The lead up to the Iraq War shared similar propagandist modeling, with The New York Times publishing various articles in favor of intervention. The influence on the population is priceless, as well.

Herman and Chomsky repeatedly pointed out that the news media's role in being the "fourth branch" is vital. They can and sometimes do stand in the way of governmental atrocities -- across the globe. They go so far as to say, "...Villainy may be constrained by intense publicity." But to get there, the media must buck the natural gravitation to follow State Department and federal government messages. The truth is often more complex than one perspective's point of view; moreover, reasons for sharing/leaking information can often benefit the source (and staff).

Additionally, the authors skillfully weave a potent conclusion, which states, "The critic must also be prepared to face a defamation apparatus against which there is little recourse, an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial." This statement notes the fact that those who oppose the propagandist model and work for alternative motives may find terrible attacks. The system and model do not enjoy critiques, as they function successfully under this manipulated purpose.

This is a work of art, and should be required reading for anyone reading, writing, or participating in media.

The authors wrote in the Preface to this 1988 book, "In this book, we sketch out a 'propaganda model' and apply it to the performance of the mass media of the United States. This effort reflects our belief, based on many years of study of the workings of the media, that they serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity, and that their choices, emphases, and omissions can often be understood best, and sometimes with striking clarity and insight, by analyzing them in such terms."

They note that "The great media also depend on the government for more general policy support" (Pg. 13), and that "Time magazine hardly attempts to hide the face that it takes its cues from Washington." (Pg. 118) Government-controlled "experts" and "pseudo-events" are used to attract media attention and "channel it in the direction of the propaganda line." (Pg. 139)

Concerning Vietnam, they assert that "principled objection to the war as ... a war crime is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion... It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable." (Pg. 252) The media encourage spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, "as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness." (Pg. 302) And it does this "without significant overt coercion." (Pg. 206)

They state, "We do not accept the view the freedom of expression must be defended ... by virtue of its expression to some higher good; rather, it is a value in itself." (Pg. 298)

This book is a challenging, provocative, and thought-provoking discussion, and well worth study by anyone, of any political persuasion.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is not what I would consider an 'exciting' read. This is an academic text (though accessible to non-academics), meticulously researched with painstaking analysis. The authors' writing style is dry, with hints of sarcastic humour. What rescues this work from tedium, however, is its intellectual honesty and interesting content. Those wishing to truly understand how the press function in Western liberal democracies should absorb Herman and Chomsky's model.

For here we are presented with a radical idea: that although the mass media portrays itself as an obstinate seeker of truth and justice, in reality it often confines itself to elite opinion, and rarely strays outside a narrow set of views. The authors posit a "propaganda model" to explain why this is the case. The model itself contains five filters through which news reporting must pass before reaching the public at large: ownership, funding, sourcing, flak, and ideology.

The first, ownership, refers to the fact that news agencies are frequently giant corporations (or subsidiaries thereof) with boards of directors drawn from elite classes: retired state officials, bankers, corporate executives, and lawyers. Funding, the second filter, is how the media makes money: namely, through advertising. Sourcing comes third; profit-driven media avoids costly investigative reporting, and instead "sources" its reporters in high-profile areas like the White House and Pentagon, where prepared PR statements are readily available to be passed on as "news". Flak, the fourth filter, refers to corporations' ability to engender negative reactions to news reporting in the form of lawsuits, think tanks, Bills before Congress, etc. Lastly, ideology is the dominating political religion of the time - "Anti-communism" during the Cold War, and "The War on Terror" today.

These five filters combine to limit the scope and depth of news reporting, and the bulk of the book proves this with case studies. Among the more fascinating examples is the Vietnam War. The traditional story is that the United States intervened to save South Vietnam from Hanoi's communist aggressions. This could not be further from the truth. After the First Indochina War (1946-54), America imposed a puppet regime in South Vietnam which lacked mass support. Realizing that socialist elements were gaining popularity, the U.S. mobilized to suppress the South Vietnamese population. By 1956, executions and forced dislocations were common, and by 1962 the U.S. had adopted an all-out bombing strategy that left thousands dead. These well-documented facts were never reported by the media, and even when the media came around, after the Tet Offensive, to opposing the war, it was only on the grounds that the well-intentioned conflict was becoming too "costly" for the United States. The very reasons for going to war in the first place were never discussed.

Thus the media, rather than questioning power, upholds and exonerates it. Further case studies include Watergate, Jerry Popie'uszko's murder, and Mehmet Ali A'ca's attempted assassination of the Pope. In each case, Herman and Chomsky's application of the propaganda model leaves littles room for doubt; their arguments are clear, logical, and well-cited. Although some parts are tedious to get through, especially the overly repetitive Chapter 3, I found the work overall enjoyable to read.

Despite their sometimes depressing tone, the authors have a delightfully sardonic sense of humour, and conclude the work with a suggestion for positive change: those of us operating outside the mainstream media's deceitful ways should organize community and local alternatives. Already there are notable examples of independent journalism - Democracy Now, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Z Magazine, among others. Instead of the corporations controlling the press, the public should. As The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling hilariously put it, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Extremely wordy, but eye-opening. Skip the introduction; you'll just confuse yourself because it discusses the contents of the book and past editions without any context.

The book demonstrates the mass media as a tool for propaganda by the corporate elite and the government. The book is a bit outdated because it doesn't account for the rapid rise of social media as a slowly emerging tool for counterbalancing the mass media propaganda machine. Despite this, most of the observations hold true and the data provided in the various chapters is very telling as to the probable causation of reporting trends (towards political/economic interests).

Great book, but not for the casual reader.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have compiled in this work an exceedingly academic account and study of the enormous mass-media apparatus that literally controls the vast majority of all media that we are exposed to on a daily basis. Contrary to the mainstream consensus, there does not exist a ‘free press’ in America, at least not in any meaningful sense of the words. What Herman and Chomsky prove in this extensively researched and documented study is that instead the media propagandize for and support the interests of the dominate institutions and groups that control and finance them.

In a ‘democratic’ society the use of propaganda is much more of a necessity then in authoritarian run societies, as the use of force and violence for the means of coercing and manipulating the thoughts and actions of the populace in these countries is severely limited, and reliance upon other means of control are thus much more of an imperative; it is in this fashion that the mass-media play their part in the ‘manufacture of consent.’ As the authors point out, perhaps this is an obvious point, one that can clearly be seen by merely picking up the paper, watching Fox News or CNN, or more aptly by pointing your attention towards the interests of the advertising companies that are placed between the pages and television segments, but what Herman and Chomsky do in an extensively researched and detailed fashion is describe the means by which this process actually occurs, and in doing so explain why it happens. Their concluding findings is aptly summed up in the opening words of the preface, “In this book, we sketch out a ‘propaganda model’ and apply it to the performance of the mass media of the United States. This effort reflects our belief, based on many years of study of the workings of the media, that they serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity, and that their choices, emphases and omissions can often be understood best, and sometimes with striking clarity and insight, by analyzing them in such terms.”(pg. lix)

Herman and Chomsky are quick to point out however that this is not accomplished through the employment of brute force, instead what the media apparatus has created is a self-censoring institution in which most of the propaganda, censorship and support for dominate interests is done by the journalists and reporters themselves, while the same reporters concurrently believe sincerely in their own independence and commitment to professional journalism. The authors describe the process by which media executives carefully select for hire the individuals that have already internalized similar values and share a similar ideological standpoint which conforms with the interests groups that dominate private industry and the state, and in doing so thereby perpetuate this ubiquitous value system that falls in line with elite interests. They write, “It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of news-worthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”(pg. xi)
Analysis of the medias structural formation, the foundations of which contribute to their self-censoring and self-propagandizing nature, forms the basis for the authors study, “In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis.”(pg. xi)

The authors go on to describe in detail their ‘propaganda model’ which seeks to explain why and how this propaganda is created. The model depicts 5 categories or ‘filters’ that work to shape media reporting and filter out the news which is ‘unfit’ to print, and insure that what does get printed allows the state and private interests to get their selected narrative across to the public: these include “(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism.”(pg. 2)
The size and concentration portion of their analysis is an interesting one. Given that the book was published in the ’80s, their analysis is at risk of being outdated, however in my opinion this dated analysis only serves to further their argument given that the concentration of media ownership has significantly increased since the book’s publication, a striking reality given the already overwhelmingly concentration of ownership that was present back in the 1980s. In the book they depict the 24 largest corporations that dominate the media, a number that today has dwindled down from 24 to about 8 which own nearly all of the companies, television stations, magazines, newspapers, radio channels, etc., that control the vast majority of information that the public receives.(1) This is a striking reality given that one of the central filters the authors point to is the media companies need to focus on profit-acquisition by placating and serving their financiers and investors so as to defend themselves from being bought out by more dominant and financially positioned conglomerates. This reliance and vital necessity for profits fuels the media’s dependence upon the companies they advertise for, as well as those that subsidize, finance and invest in them, and this therefore furthers the servility of the media towards the interests of these financiers.

The authors conclude their work with case studies in which they apply the propaganda model to various events covered in the media. They depict the way in which the media portrays the ‘worthy victims’ and ‘unworthy victims’ of conflicts based upon which atrocities are carried out by enemies of the US versus those carried out by the US itself. The accounts of media sycophancy to the government agenda in terms of the terror war against Nicaragua and the support for the brutal regimes of El Salvador and Guatemala, detailed by media hypocrisy in terms of each countries elections, a bias clearly defined by which states the US supports and which states it wants to dominate, gives the reader a very effective lesson in the history of these conflicts. One also learns in detail the history of the war in Vietnam, as well as the US attacks on Laos and Cambodia, and the US-sponsored Indonesian invasion of East Timor. By seeing what the media chose to report on, and more telling what they chose to leave out, the reader is left with a very interesting and effective lesson on these conflicts. One is left both with a solid grasp on history as well as a realization that within each instance the media served the function of propaganda for state wars and crimes, and was complicit in the furtherance of these conflicts by doing so. The authors as well depict the media coverage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and the IMF in the updated introduction, detailing how advocates of environmental wellbeing and labor-rights are derided while the policies and institutions who benefit the powerful at the cost of the environment and labor in turn receive honorable mention. There is a section detailing a falsely reported US media account of a KGB plot to assassinate the pope, which the authors go on to fully debunk as having no credible basis whatsoever. Although this was interesting, it’s really just par for the course in terms of false media propaganda stories (the false ‘Syrian Danny’ reports come to mind) and it carried little historical value for me to learn about, it not being a major event in history and all, so I didn’t enjoy reading it as much as I did the other parts of the book. Besides that one section however, the rest of the work is an extremely informative account of media complicity in propaganda reporting as well as a good refresher on history of past foreign policy.

Despite being an outdated work, the structural formation of the mass-media that Herman and Chomsky describe has not changed, and therefore this extensive analytical study of the fundamental structure of this apparatus holds true even today in 2015. In actuality its conclusions have only been strengthened: the media still rely on the State Department, intelligence officials, military authorities and corporate elites as their go-to ‘experts’ on topics, the corporations and government still indirectly subsidize the media by employing a vast plethora of individuals whose sole job is to accommodate journalists and get the news to the media in the fastest way possible, the media is still run by corporations that makes money by selling its audience to other companies in the form of advertisements, the structure of these institutions still necessitates a primary drive for profits, and the consolidation of media ownership into the hands of a few executives and mega-conglomerates still pervades at an even more alarming rate today. It is for these reasons that Manufacturing Consent is still a viable analysis, and a must-read for anyone still encumbered by the false protestation of a ‘free press’ within America, as well as anyone who is interested to understand why the media so unabashedly propagandizes for the state in a society which is not controlled by force, as were more salient examples of propaganda such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In the end, what should be taken away from all of this is that, “Along with trying to contain and reverse the growing centralization of the mainstream media, grassroots movements and intermediate groups that represent large numbers of ordinary citizens should put much more energy and money into creating and supporting their own media. [This] will be essential for the achievement of major democratic social and political successes.” (pg. xlix)

Sources:
1. Shah, Anup. “Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership.” Global Issues: Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All. 02 Jan. 2009. Web. Accessed on 01 July 2014. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/159/media-conglomerates-mergers-concentration-of-ownership>.

Book does not match the picture in the order. I got a different version then all of my classmates, which is a bit frustrating. Content appears to be the same, but my cover and size of the book is different then what I thought I was going to get.

Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent pretty much sums up how the media works within the United States model of democracy. Far from a "conspiracy theorist" (which Chomsky is not) evaluation, the authors explain that the control of the media is systematic within a corporate-controlled framework; that is to say that, since the media is essentially run by large corporations, they wont go too far to the left, exposing the crimes of the country that allowed them to be subsequently rich. So this book is as much of a "conspiracy" analysis as an analysis of capitalism itself it, which is ludicrous, as neither are "conspiratorial" (in the sense of people who think, for example, the U.S. government faked the 1969 moon landing), but rather the expected, systematic outcome of what takes place under such a system; YOU own a newspaper - you get YOUR views across (or something close to it).

Chomsky and Herman vociferously reveal that political debate is framed within certain bounds that are mainly applicable to how far "left" you can go. For example, the question is always asked, "What are `we' going to do about Iran's nuclear program?" The question is almost never asked whether they have the right to even have a nuclear program, so there definitely won't ever be any debate within that framework. So in other words, the media makes presuppositions we're just supposed to accept, and if we don't debate within that structure, we'll be labeled "marginal" and thus our opinions shunned.

This book is far better than, say, Slander, by Ann Coulter, as she apparently fails to understand the role of the "liberal" intellectuals and reporters, which is to set the bounds on how far to the left you can go in political debate - and if you cross that line, there will be a whole list of words you'll be called, like,

-socialist
-communist
-anti-American
-terrorist sympathizer
-and a slew of other silly buzzwords, which have been completely evacuated of any substance, and utilized purposely to dismantle any further discourse.

Anton Batey
[email protected]

Most folks would bristle at the suggestion that they are capable of being manipulated, let alone the proposal that they are. The abstract concept of independence is so fundamental to our national identity as to become central to individual core values. To suggest that a person is somehow less then 100% free in body, mind and spirit is more then just offensive; it's positively unpatriotic.

To Americans the concept of propaganda is unpleasant, foreign, sinister, threatening. Usually associated with distant places populated with people different from us who speak strange languages and have bizarre customs and because they're so backwards, they practice some sort of primitive economic/political system at odds with our own possessing violent expansionist intentions. In short, the Generalized Other. Propaganda is something the Germans did in WW2, or Soviet era Russia, or those cah-raazy North Koreans with their cah-raazy leader. Propaganda isn't something that could ever happen here, so let's stick with the pleasantly acceptable euphamism, Mass Influence.

The mass media is comprised of a collection of for profit business corporations. The purpose of any business is to make money, in the case of a corporation, they have a legal fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder return, and can be sued if they don't. Mass media make their money by selling exposure to their audience to advertisers. Since it is so lucrative, they will do anything to increase their audience share. Massive amounts of capital are spent employing the brightest minds in psychology, marketing, and other creative disciplines developing increasingly sophisticated methods and techniques to influence the public, specifically to get and maintain attention, and create a suggestible state of mind. So that the public is more likely to go buy whatever it is they're selling. This is called effective advertising. Advertisers being their source of revenue, and alternate divisions part of the same organization (the connections are vast and serpentine, the obfuscation deliberate) possessing a mutual self-interest, media distributors are not about to draw attention to information that is unflattering of them. It's just common sense not to bite the hand that feeds you, and protect your family.

Now, if mass media is the worlds biggest attention whore, how do they get the public to pay attention? Content. They want it as fast and cheap and effective as possible, and tons of it is distributed, free of charge from Washington DC. You didn't really think all these news networks maintained foreign offices, with desks of reporters covering the Mumbai beat, did you? No! They just take what they get from Washington, and regurgitate it for mass consumption. If they don't do it how DC likes it, their access gets restricted, and they suffer a comparative disadvantage to their competition. That's a pretty compelling reason to stay in line and do what you're told.

To assume that a government dependent on popular support and approval for most of its activities would seek objective truth as the primary goal in its production and release of information is gullibly naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst. Any entity is going to present itself in the best possible light, that's just human nature, and the government is going to produce and release information intended to influence public opinion to support its practices and policies. A great deal of Manufacturing Consent is dedicated to demonstrating this premise, and it is done quite effectively.

Traditionally, propaganda has been quite crude in it's design. It was distributed directly from the government to the public. In Soviet Russia, the national paper was called Pravda. That means Truth. It's pretty easy to see through that one. But over here, we've got the most sophisticated Mass Influence information dissemination system ever designed. The process of Mass Influence will be more effective if people believe what they're told and people will inherently have greater trust for a third party with the facade of impartiality then the source itself.

True independence of mind and spirit takes work and folks tend to prefer a comfortable illusion to an unpleasant reality, so this book is not for everybody. But it is infinitely rewarding for those who would make the effort.

'Our media is the propaganda arm of the elite' - that's the message here. Not news. Anyone who has been awake would have already realized that. Write critical stories and sources will stop talking to you and providing information/data. Write critical stories and you'll lose advertising volume. And on the other hand, everybody is willing to feed the media with glowing stories about what they've done lately - it's a whole lot easier and safer to just use that material.

As for how Chomsky extended his purview from being an academic linguist to war crtic, etc. - there's no connection other than the former provided a platform for the latter.

Bottom-Line: I like Chomsky, but this book/DVD combination doesn't serve him well.

"This book centers in what we call a "Propaganda Model", an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful social interests that control and finance them.... In our view the...underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted...are...well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis."
Noam Chomsky (MIT)
and Edward Herman (Wharton Business School)
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
From the Introduction
Next to the Bible, Joseph Campbell's THE POWER OF MYTH and FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, the seminal work of psychologist Alice Miller, every single American home should have this book. Perhaps to a greater extent than even much of the other work of Noam Chomsky, MANUFACTURING CONSENT reveals the irony of where a truly moral path leads in our world. Meaning, the religious/moral paradigms of Christian Conservatism, embraced in the inner world of personal integrity and "family values" and followed to their obvious conclusion--our outer world structured by commerce and international politics--leads one invariably to finding GOD somewhere on the left of America's political center; far and away from the Limbaugh-isms on the radio. Anything less is either cancerous cynicism or delusional hypocrisy.
Or both.
"'Genocide' is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes. Thus, with Saddam Hussein and Iraq having been U.S. targets in the 1990s, whereas Turkey has been an ally and client and the United States its major arms supplier as IT engaged in its severe ethnic cleansing of Kurds during those years, we find...Turkey's treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq's treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for (U.S. Ambassador) Peter Galbraith, Turkey only 'represses,' while Iraq engages in 'genocide.'"
From the Introduction (emphasis mine)
This 2002 edition of the 1980s MANUFACTURING CONSENT has a new introduction written by the authors that includes some important words about the current Administration and foreign policy, as well the power of the Internet to affect the Media's status quo. But lest you think the bulk of this work is dated, trust me; their analysis has only become more accurate with the Clinton and Bush Administrations. The writers don't need to add specific revelations about, say, Enron, the true cause of 9/11 and the current secret war in Afghanistan to prove their point.
(For example, see their comparative analysis of the painfully ironic relationship of the U.S. government with the Latin-American terrorist states Guatemala and El Salvador [we supported them militarily] and its adversarial relationship with the actual [though politically inconvenient] democracy Nicaragua during the Reagan years. Then compare this provable reality to the Media's Orwellian, fun-house mirror images and writings, as Chomsky and Herman show them to be. It is chilling. Through more than dozens of easily documented but heretofore underanalysed examples, the writers show how the dominant U.S. press (New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, etc.) so often becomes the propaganda tool of the U.S. government that only an analysis of this degree would help you to understand what must be its obvious actual function. This work, in fact, may be the only book that could prepare you or anyone well enough to read the revelations of investigative journalist Gary Webb in his book DARK ALLIANCE, the book that gives the full documented proof of the story that ironically ended his career in the 1990's: his discovery of the origins of America's Crack Cocaine era in "IranContra" and Reagan's CIA.)
What the book lacks can be seen as a product of its internationally political perspective. The raison d'etre of this book is indeed all but stated outright with its final chapters on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam during and after the Vietnam War. (One could painfully envision Thomas Mann writing a similarly structured expose of the German media during World War Two, ending with documented proof of the otherwise hidden "final solution" for the Jews.) Through this they climactically prove, unquestionably, that the popular story of the Media's East-of-Eden break with Government & propaganda at this time in American history is, simply, a very useful myth. However, while Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and several other consumer advocates over the 20th Century are mentioned by them in this introduction, the kind of "muckraking" examples you'd expect in that context, regarding the purposely unreported crimes of big business (like those of the chemical, fast food and oil industries)--despite their adverse affects on human health and American culture--are almost conspicuously missing from this work. I would suggest, as a companion book, INTO THE BUZZSAW by investigative journalist Christina Borjesson, with its powerful Introduction by Gore Vidal.
Just the same, I cannot imagine an honest critique of this book's contents that would not smack of a sincere desire (subconscious or otherwise) to be lied to, such that a primitive, cultish, cynically comfortable but inevitably destructive definition of American patriotism can have some illusion of moral validity. The opening chapters set you up so clearly and powerfully for their revealing of the U.S. supported holocaust of Indochina--again, displayed as final proof of their Propaganda Model's ubiquity--that you cannot help but walk away from this book with both an enlightened mind, and a broken heart.
Agree or disagree with this book's premise, after reading MANUFACTURING CONSENT you will not be able to read the newspaper or watch CNN with the same naiveté again. That alone makes it a treasure.

........then you should read this book. He provides 5 principles as to how the mainstream media news we hear is in reality filtered in favour of the government and big business interests (which are both very similar). He then illustrates these with very well researched practical examples. Of note, he also destroys the whole 'the media lost the US the Vietnam war' argument. That part was fascinating. He sources his work extremely well. His principles can be seen at work today (remember the lancet article about Iraqi civilian deaths and the 'flak' it copped?).

Of note, I am not a socialist. Luckily, in the internet age, we can obtain news from a variety of sources. However, western governments are already beginning to 'regulate' internet use. Watch this space.

Written in 1988, Manufacturing Consent is the classic left-wing analysis of US mass media as a "propaganda model". Chomsky and Herman challenged accepted notions of press objectivity (and this was way before Fox News!).

An excerpt: "The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda."

Read it critically, but read it and especially read the footnotes, which provide the sources to back up their claims. The authors provide specific examples of how major media, especially the New York Times' foreign policy coverage to demonstrate how the propaganda model works. It will change the way you read the newspaper or watch TV news. Brilliant stuff.

Since the path-breaking critical analysis of modern capitalist society as ruled by the power elite by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s, a number of social critics have noted the many ways in which the media plays a critical role in disarming and pacifying the general public through the manipulation and presentation of news and information. No one better summarizes the ways in which this is accomplished on a continuing basis than do these authors, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. The book focuses on what the authors refer to as a `propaganda model', one comprising a heuristic framework that views the actual performance of the national media in terms of its rudimentary structural characteristics and the relational milieu in which they operate. Put into more simple terms, they observe the ways in which the fact of the media being the creation of the elite to promulgate their take on reality results from who inhabits the news room and collects the news, on the one hand, and who owns the means of media production, on the other.

According to the authors' views, not only does the media serve the interests of the power elite, but they promulgate and extend the general view of the world of those interests that both control and finance them. The powers that be have vested interests and ulterior goals and objectives that they wish to forward, and given their singular power to both influence and constrain the actions of the media, they have a unique ability to both shape and direct media policy and content. The means by which this undue influence is operated is through the selection of the people manning the posts of the media itself, through ensuring that those chosen to operate in the milieu are `right-thinking' people who share their values, their goals, and their upper class perspectives. Given the selection criteria, it should be no surprise to discover the degree to which media professional share the internalized priorities and definitions of the power elite itself.
The authors show how the use of the so-called free market model of the media leads inexorably toward the normative and extremely focused reporting characteristic of the conservative and pro-business values of the upper class. With lucid prose and illuminating case studies, they carefully document how the interaction of the American federal government and the corporate structure profoundly influence the content and context of everything Americans read, see on TV, and hear over the radio. Herman and Chomsky identify three major forces creating such a propaganda-prone media bias; first, the motivation for profit via the device of advertising; second, the fact that the media is embedded within, and controlled by, corporations whose views are predictably pro-business; and third, the near-exclusive use of information coming from highly biased sources. Taken in total, the authors handily demonstrate the ways in which information disseminated from the media to the public is heavily weighted toward the views, idea, and perspectives of the ruling class, and in this way the realities that surround us are systematically distorted. It is a media system which panders without shame toward to the interests and goals of the power elite ands which systematically ignores it stated obligation under the Constitution to inform ordinary citizens of what they need to know to act responsibly and knowledgably as active citizens in a democratic society. Enjoy!

Excellent critique of mass media on grounds of market censorship. Many negative reviews seem to miss a point made by the authors--that information and points of view adverse to government interests still are presented, but in an extremely limited way (especially relative to the information and points of view which compliment the governmental and corporate interests).

The book presents a general framework and then applies it to events which are now unfortunately dated, though the general theory remains relevant and any thinking person can see it at work in current events.

This book summarizes much of what Chomsky and Herman have been saying for decades on various events and how US media interprets them in the form of well documented case studies. The book begins by outlining a Propaganda Model, 5 filters through which news must pass before making it to the mainstream American news:
-size, ownership and profit orientation
-Advertising as major revenue
-News sourcing
-"flak"
-anti-communism ( more appropriately, ideology)
Basically a news item must generally be in the interests of the huge conglomerations that own them, must not offend advertisers and often comes from Government experts and members of think tanks with a "liberal" or right wing bias (liberal practically means right wing these days). If a news item steps out of line, as does happen on occasion, there will be flak generated (from groups like Accuracy in Media, AIM, or from a variety of right-wing pundits, for example) which will make the media source think twice about taking this point of view a second time. If a story is not sufficiently anti-communist (pro-capitalist, anti-"terrorist"), it will not likely make the major news. The book goes on in detail about each of the filters and their relative importance and function, and then goes on to look at specific case studies of events and the American News media's interpretation of these events.
"Worthy and Unworthy Victims" looks at the case of a priest murdered in Poland by Polish police in 1984 (under Communist rule) vs. over 100 religious murders by state police in US client regimes in Latin America from 1968 from 1985, and how the media treated these two cases. In their model the priest will get much more coverage than the people killed by US clients with US support (4 were even US nuns!). The results are shocking, with 78 articles on Jerzy Popieluszko (the priest in Poland) vs. only 57 mentions of nearly 100 murders in Latin America.
Next they cover Third World elections, comparing in a very objective manner the coverage of "demonstration" elections in US client states vs. the Nicaraguan Elections of 1984. Again the Propaganda Model predicts that the elections in client countries, no matter how brutal, no matter how much intimidation exists, will legitimize fascist regimes, whereas the Sandinista election is portrayed as meaningless, as an essentially undiscussed fact. They go into some detail as to what the conditions surrounding a free election are and generally by any objective measure the Nicaraguan election comes much closer (by no means perfect, but look at the 2000 US election for an interesting comparison!) than that of the Dominican Republic of 1966, El Salvadore in 1982 and 1984, or in Guatamala in 1984-1985, all extreme terror states with well documented murders and tortures going on every day during the periods in question. As predicted, the media follow the US government line, and do not call into question some very obvious propaganda efforts.
The KGB/Bulgarian plot to assassinate the pope shows their Propaganda Model to be bang on yet again, with some facts that the media should be very embarrassed about today, from motives (why on earth would the KGB hire a Turk, who is a known associate with an extremist right-wing group to kill the pope???), to the fact that no trace of a connection was ever proven.
The final case deals with the Indo-China wars, and how these were dealt with, Vietnam in one chapter, and Cambodia and Laos in in the next. The main point they discuss is the widely held view that the media "lost the war" by their aggressive stances and negative coverage. Without too much difficulty they show this idea to be self-serving propaganda, as the criticism levelled was mostly tactical, and rarely (never!) questioned the morality of the war in the first place.
The Cambodia material is what apologists for state violence really latch onto to create false claims made by the authors. The argument goes that they questioned what was going on in Cambodia in 1975, based on the information available at that time, which by extension implies denial of Khmer Rouge atrocities. This is simply not true, as many quotes from the book easily demonstrate. Speaking of the three phases of the decade of genocide in Cambodia: "Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge..." This hardly sounds like a line form Pol Pot supporters, but truth is of little importance to the ones who actually are apologizing for massive crimes, namely Phase I (1970 - 1975) when the US was bombing Cambodia into a moonscape, killing an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. How people who criticise Chomsky and Herman for being Khmer Rouge Apologists (their crimes were something which we in the west had no control of) while ignoring the huge crime committed by the US in the years leading up to the Pol Pot era is beyond hypocrisy. Chomsky and Herman claim that the scale of both atrocities is of about the same scale, yet phase one is always ignored in all of the negative reviews of their works, and generally in the media.
Even more telling is the fact that The west then SUPPORTED Pol Pot in phase 3 of the genocide, as now the Khmer Rouge were fighting the Vietnamese. Again the hypocrisy is beyond words.
In summary, this is a very important work on the functioning of modern industrial democracies, and how citizens are not provided the information they need to properly assess world events. An added bonus in the re-released version (2002) is a new introduction essay which speaks of how their model fares with more recent events such as NAFTA, the Seattle protests, and Kosovo, to name a few. If you are truly interested in why the world we live in has become such a bizarre and increasingly violent place, this is a good place to start, from two authors who have not shied away from the truth for decades.

Most of you that went to the more open-minded schools (depending on your major) have already read this I'm sure. With conservative schools and radio keeping me away from great books like this, I am glad that I'm finally catching up!! What's ironic is that having been in the media for close to 20 years, I should have read an earlier edition of this book a long time ago. I can see the way that opinion and bias are developed having been inside the media, and always had in the back of my mind that the hard questions are not REALLY being asked, but it has never been stated more eloquently than by Herman and Chomsky in this book. Using examples of the U.S. meddling in Central America in the 80's, the assassination attempt of the Pope, and the Indochina wars, the authors do an incredible job of showing that there are boundaries for allowable debate in this and many Western countries. The "Propaganda model" as they call it, is even more effective than state-run media in totalitarian societies where the media bias is much more transparent. They also dispel the myth of the "liberal" media bias by pointing out that the media companies with any size (and hence any legitimate voice), are all owned by large rich corporations who have much more conservative interests at heart. No matter how much idealism a young journalist may have upon entering the business, he will quickly find that the propaganda machine is so engrained in the modern media that he will eventually conform and do so perhaps without even realizing it. The government, advertisers and corporate owners all have their own version of checks and balances that keep the media in line...I'll leave you to figure out how each one could affect the bottom line of the media corporation and/or the individual journalist. Capitalism is a bank and upper class run system of government, and since they are also the ones who OWN the media, are we really that much more free in our speech here than anywhere else? Sure, theoretically you can start your own media company and say what you want. It's allowed. However, to draw the large advertisers, and get the government sources, you need to conform to their version of the story. Also, the start-up costs for even a small radio station or small village monthly newspaper are out of reach for most American citizens. So much for true freedom of the press. The internet has certainly helped to give voice to people who previously didn't have it, but you must be able to attract a large number of hits to your blog or site to REALLY get the word out, and much the same that used to apply to more classic forms of media would also apply to the large internet news outlets. This book is THE CLASSIC on this topic, and everyone should read it and take a much more critical approach to the information that they are fed.

In this critique of the American Mass Media, the authors present a "propaganda model" and then go on to support it with a variety of examples. The model is based on five "filters" that news passes through:

1. That of corporate/profit-minded ownership

2. Of advertising as a revenue model, which makes media reliant on big advertisers

3. Of the necessity to be close to common "sources" of news and PR (because the media can not be present themselves everywhere that news is made at the time it's made), many of which are controlled by Government and big corporations

4. The aversion to Flak, i.e., negative responses to media programs and

5. Anti-communism as a control mechanism (yes, the book is fairly old - it was originally written in 1988, I think)

These forces cause the media to behave in certain strange ways towards news. One of these, the authors point out, is the treatment of "worthy" and "unworthy" victims, the former being those that are oppressed by/in countries aligned with Communists, and the latter being victims of policies supported by the United States. For instance, the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko, a Polish priest murdered by the Polish police, attracted far greater attention in the media than the murders of several other priests murdered in countries that were within the American sphere of influence.

Unlike other treatments that suggest a conspiracy theory, the authors have chosen to analyze the forces (the five filters) that make journalists and others internalize the principles of distortion.

The Propaganda Model in the book is very powerful, and comes alive through the numerous case studies. As the authors point out, a freely functioning media is often thought to be central to any notion of a democracy, and hence the importance of this deep understanding of the ways the media operates.

The book leaves me hanging with a few thoughts:

1. How does this thinking apply to media in other countries where the models of ownership, legal structures, market economy and many other variables are very different? Especially, I am curious to know if someone has done a similar analysis of media in my home country, India.

2. Is the web helping democratize news? The authors talk a fair bit about the consolidation of mainstream media in a few hands, and the reasons for that which are primarily around the economics of distribution. I feel that the web has changed the economics sufficiently for news to become more open, but I'd love to see a more academic treatment of the subject.

Americans are not happy with the performance of the news media, and a number of scholars and pundits have given their two cents on the topic. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky --- who had already given more than two cents in the past --- joined forces to write their own critique in 1988. The result (reprinted in 2002 with a new forward) is one of the most important media studies ever written.
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.

This subject is something that I have always felt existed, just didnt know how very deep it runs. Great book! Another companion book is Planned Collapse of Americanism by Edward Glinka! Fascinating too and covers much that this book doesn't. Both books fascinating!

Herman and Chomsky create a compelling model of how five filters (ownership, advertising, official sources, flak, and ideology) skew the news media. Their narrative case studies (eg, the coverage of the attempted assasination of john paul II) falls into the familiar pattern of, the media says X, but I think Y, so the media are liars. However their pseudo-experiments are extremely convincing. For these analyses, they quantify the press coverage of comparable events (crooked elections and clergy assassinations) committed by American allies and American enemies and find that malfeasance by the Warsaw Pact and Sandinistas was much more publicized than comparable crimes by pro-US Salvadoran and Guatemalan juntas.
Nonetheless, there are three notable limitations to the book:
1) There is no connection between the mechanisms of the theory and the evidence, that is, while their evidence shows the predicted result (hegemonic distortion), it is not connected to specific filters in the model. For instance, they fail to show whether low coverage of Guatemalan clergy assasinations were caused by advertiser pressure, reliance on official sources, or one of the other filters.
2) The book focuses exclusively on Cold War foreign policy, at least in its data, and does not address any other news topics. Therefore, it's problematic to assume that since the media is demonstrably anti-communist it will also be, for example, anti-abortion. It's possible that the media may skew right on some issues, left on others, and be unbiased on yet other issues.
3) Related to my second point, even if the filters all run in one direction for foreign policy, they may contradict each other or have more nuanced effects for other issues. For instance, Lichter and Rothman's poll data (Public Opinion Quarterly articles) show the media elite to be centrist on most social issues. Likewise, Gitlin (Inside Prime Time) shows that the television industry strives to avoid offending both left and right. Neither of these are congruent with assuming uniformly conservative effects of the "advertising" and "ideology" filters.

Media Analysis

Manufacturing Consent was written by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 and addresses the censorship in Media. They apply a propaganda model to the mass media in attempts to expose the true machine of mass media in the united states. They see the media as a dichotomy between theory and practice. In theory that the media is independent and committed to discovering the truth; which is separate from mobilizing support for special interests. The propaganda model addresses the inequality of wealth and power, and its multileveled effects on mass media interests and choices. The mass media serves as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. They have total control over what the citizens of our country are exposed to, and what is deemed as pertinent information. Within this propaganda model there is a money and power filter that determines the news fit to print. For instance, in the 80's "anticommunism" was used as a control mechanism. Anyone who needed to be made an enemy for political and financial reasons could be labeled a communist, making it justifiable for the media to attack them and get the support of the American people. This propaganda system portrays people abused in enemy states as worthy victims.
There are five filters that narrow the range of news that pass through the gates. The first filter is limitation on ownership of media with a bottom line of maximizing profit. The second filter is advertising where the media tries to attract the audience with the highest buying power. The third filter is mass media sourcing where large beauracracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media. The fourth filter is enforcement. The fifth filter is anticommunism. Communism is a fuzzy concept that can be thrown at anyone that threatens and supports radicalism.
The mainstream press will decide what is covered because they have the power to do so and want the stories that give them financial gain. Relevant issues will go untouched and questions unanswered if it makes America look bad. This book is an in depth look at various cases from the 1980's where media had total control of the perspective and bias of the given incidents. It is a long and laborious read, but a must if you are looking to study the mass media to great extent.

Manufacturing Consent is essential reading for anyone interested in the way the media operate and how our political policies are influenced by corporate decision-making. This book becomes ever more relevant as more and more media fall into the hands of giant conglomerates--companies with huge conflicts of interest. I would also highly recommend another of Chomsky's books, Necessary Ilussions, and a wonderful text by Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly. Also, for a look at how the giant American media distort coverage in a particular case, there's The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner. I use these texts in my journalism classes and I would recommend that other journalism professors take a look at them.

Herman and Chomsky argue that our news media channels follow a propaganda model which governs the editorial policy of the particular channel. The model results in a tacit protection of the status quo, where facts inconvenient to the governing policy are left out or placed in a context that lacks either focus or outrage. This is not caused by an explicit conspiracy, but is rather the result of economic and supply (information source alignment) realities. In the US, we give a great deal of attention to the problem of physical threat as the largest enemy to our closely held ideal of a free press. Herman/Chomsky force the reader to consider other (perhaps more effective) methods of coercion.
To support their assertion about the relevance of this model, Herman and Chomsky use paired examples. They choose an instance of an event which occurs in at least two countries (elections, atrocities, etc.). They then make a comparison between how the US media treats that event when given two countries on different sides of the US government friend/foe line. They do not argue that facts are per se suppressed, but rather focus on the context of the presentation of the facts and the relationship between media entities and their owners/advertisers/government forces.
Herman/Chomsky clearly have a political flavor (as do most commentators) but regardless of whether the reader agrees with the entirety of their evidence, it is difficult to dismiss the model which has been built here with such painstaking care. Anyone who is a student of media or political economy will benefit from reading _Manufacturing Consent_.

In the first chapter, Herman and Chomsky explain why the US media operate as propaganda outlets if there is no totalitarian government forcing them to do so. Each of the chapters that follow is a case study demonstrating that the media do, in fact, serve the interests of the government and the business community by propagandizing the public. The case studies are meticulously argued and the book is damning in its conclusions. I came to the book already skeptical of US media but was shocked by the systemic bias and deceit documented by Herman and Chomsky.

As one can see by the quantity and voracity of the commentary on this book, it is an important and controversial work that deserves a read (though from misstatements in their commentary, I question whether some of the critics actually read it, however).

Nearly two decades after its first publication, Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" stands the test of time surprisingly well in spite of the myriad far-reaching geopolitical shifts that have taken place. This is largely due to the open-ended nature of "Consent's" market analysis which rejects the notion of a large, unwieldy body of conspirators or the notion that the media is monolithic. Chomsky and Herman readily concede that exceptions to their theory can and do occur.

"Manufacturing Consent" is an academic exercise, so it lacks much of the flair and pacing of popular current affairs literature. It is, at times, droll and tedious. What it lacks in style, however, it more than makes up for in substance as a critical lens with which to frame the behavior of the mass media. As an academic exercise, its assertions are well-sourced and it adheres closely to the standards of intellectual honesty.

Chomsky and Herman begin with a thesis; that the behavior of the media can be understood (and even predicted) within the context of a "market analysis" of five "filters";

"(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) `flak' as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) `anticommunism' as a national religion and control mechanism."

The latter, "anticommunism", has since been revised slightly (noted in this edition of the book) given the fall of the Soviet Union, as Herman has elsewhere noted;

"the fifth filter - anticommunist ideology - is possibly weakened by the collapse of the Soviet Union and global socialism, but this is easily offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the `miracle of the market.' There is now an almost religious faith in the market, at least among the elite, so that regardless of evidence, markets are assumed benevolent and non-market mechanisms are suspect."

The rest of the book serves to provide examples that bolster this thesis as Chomsky and Herman illustrate the various ways in which the "Propaganda Model" plays out in the "agenda-setting media." They cover well-established paradigms in the social sciences like "worthy and unworthy victims."

Some have criticized "Consent" as being "selective". This is certainly true; however it is not selective in any sort of deliberately manipulative way. "Consent" could easily be a 60-volume set - but the demands of concision require that the authors be selective about what examples they cite lest their work turn into the phone book. Anyone who has read Chomsky's other works knows how voluminous his body of work is and how many additional writings he's penned since 1988 that serve as still more evidence for the basic thesis of the Propaganda Model.

Ever the skeptic, I used Manufacturing Consent as the basis for my Master's Thesis to test its application in the modern era; a content analysis of US media coverage of the simultaneous conflicts in Kosovo and East Timor. After pouring over 6,000 articles in print - my research provided me with another compelling example that corroborated the Propaganda Model.

Those interested in broadening their understanding of the concepts Chomsky and Herman present would do well to also read "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays and "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann (from whose writings the title of "Manufacturing Consent" was derived).

Manufacturig consent is an outstanding work reflecting the extent of compliance with power that the media's kept throughout the 20th century, with the purpose of clearing doubts among the audience through the exploitation of propaganda to guarantee that power's shaping of policies are indoctrinated upon the public while the same learns sitematically not to question them.
The book also shows how the media, in a very unethical and subsirvient manner, fabricates an distributes pre-fabricated lies or half truths meant to be swallowed by the people, in order to facilitates the actions of powerful individuals through their subordinate agents in the government to make decisions for their own personal profit.
To do that then, Chomsky argues that it's necessary to create n environment that would approach the population into accepting it through manipulation from their leaders, and at a substantial extent, that is done with the help of media anchors, spin hosts, reporters, idle TV shows, "intellectuals" who are more close to being PR practioners,and by other agents of propaganda.
although the authors focus mostly on the US, it gives a clear indication of how the powerful uses different tools to control the population in general, as Chomsky assures that propaganda is to democracy what repression is to totalitarianism.
The book does not offer however enough theorethical explanation to the authors' claims, it remarkably shows them with perfect examples detailed in six chapters, which include corporate profitability purposes of the media, the relevance of "worthy" and "unworthy" victims in other countries, the discreditation or glorifying of elections held in third world countries, exhaustingly pursuing investigations on the enemy's crimes while ignoring the ones comitted by the U.S. and its clients
and the covering of the Indochina wars among others.
Without a doubt, Manufacturing Consent broaden the conventional and traditional way of how we come to understand a part of the structure of power, breaking barriers of limitations that kept us for so long blinded and vulnerable to propaganda control.

The title and subtitle are misleading: this is not a book about the impact of media on the public or about the internal structures of the media. The first chapter does lay out a compelling but sketchy structural model explaining how an ostensibly free media could produce coverage so uncritically supportive of the government, but Chomsky and Herman focus most of their attention on proving that the media really are serving as the government's propaganda arm.
They confine their analysis to foreign policy, and the evidence they offer is devastating. Particularly strong are chapters 2-3, which use quantitative data to compare the media coverage given to U.S. government enemy states and allied states. In chapter 2, a single state-sponsored murder in Soviet-client Poland is set against 100 state-sponsored murders in America's Central American client states in the 1980s. Surveying coverage in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and CBS News, those 100 murders combined consistently received less - and much less sympathetic or indignant - coverage than the one murder in Poland. Chapter 3 compares coverage of sham elections in the (U.S.-supplied) military terror states of Guatemala and El Salvador with that of flawed but generally democratic elections in official enemy Nicaragua. The broadly favorable and optimistic tone of reporting on elections staged by U.S.-supported death squad dictators provides a shocking contrast to the overwhelmingly critical (often polemical) approach to the more free and fair Nicaraguan elections.
While these two chapters are written in a style of scholarly detachment with quantitative data to back up the qualitative analysis, the rest of the book is much more a polemic against U.S. foreign policy and media complicity with it. Reflexively pro-American readers are likely to be too alienated by the style to get anything out of it, but for those convinced by the evidence in chapters 2-3, Chomsky and Herman's analysis of the U.S. wars against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will prove highly educational.
The updated edition contains a long preface demonstrating the continuing propaganda function of the media by reviewing coverage of events since the first edition came out in 1988. Particularly revealing is the contrast between heavy negative coverage given to Slobodan Milosevic's atrocities against the Kosovars and the perfunctory media attention to Turkey's very similar - but U.S.-funded - atrocities against the Kurds.
As Chomsky and Herman show, the media only become critical of the government when some elite constituency like business or the Democrats speak out. And even then, criticism is tactical rather than fundamental. This was vividly demonstrated in the debate leading up the Iraq invasion, when the media allowed plenty of voices warning that American interests could in some way be damaged, but none that condemned war itself as immoral or that questioned the U.S. right to dominate other nations. As Chomsky and Herman make clear, this happens not as the result of any sort of conspiracy, but through the natural operation of indoctrination within media institutions and the structural constraints (e.g. relying almost exclusively on government officials as sources) on news gathering. That a free society could produce a deeply subservient media is perhaps the most disturbing conclusion of all.

Thesis is shocking, yet clear and well supported by data presented. The book may appear to be outdated but is actually more apt than ever, as opined in the afterword of the 20th anniversary edition. Worth reading, the abundance of data and evidence might be hard to plow through though.

Ever since the term 'ideology' appears in the wake of the French Revolution its implications have haunted modernity (although an equal case could be made that it springs from the beginnings of civilization and/or religion, consider Constatantine's manufacture of consent), on the left as much as on the right. This book superbly carries the discussion into the present with its acute Propaganda Model and case studies thereof. The law of propaganda is too transparent in the totalitarian legacy, and leaves one unsuspecting of the subtler forms of media manipulation alive and well in the economy of late capitalism.
But it might also help to consider the legacy of leftist manufacture of consent, and before that the Hegelian candidate as it courted the Prussian world of the Restoration, leading into the stand up/sit down dialectic over ideology in the generation of Marx, at once exposing capitalist mystification, then crystallizing into 'late Hegelian' economism. The issue is important since the left is too often mesmerized by the remaining bits and pieces of the Second Internationale 'ideology' that so cleverly animated the 'myth' of Marxism. This legacy tends inject cliched sloganeering into social commentary, making it useless to progressives, and preempting clear commentary. In fact the discourse of Chomsky is well aware of this effect and successfully revives the essential critiques of the Left Hegelian era in a practical form.
The book has a fascinating bit on the early leftist print media of the early nineteenth century, a thriving industry, that slowly but surely succumbed to the new model of free market journalism. And it is interesting that(as pointed out in Desmond and Moore's bio of Darwin)that these newspapers were hot on 'evolution' in its radical phase. Then, of course, the estab Darwin came along and 'fixed' the idea of evolution with his ideological selectionism and Social Darwinism, and the greatest episode of 'manufactured consent' began in the field of biology. The problem is that they manufactured the consent of the left here, and by the time of Engels and after the confusions of theory and ideology were built into Marxism. Chomsky is (or was) one of the few Darwin critics left, let's hope they don't manufacture his consent here.
Great book.

Manufacturing consent; Chomsky and Edward is a juicily subversive philosophical book bristling and buzzing with ideas, it is a brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, the book revolves around five case studies. Reading the book, you will realize that in the political economy of the Mass Media there are five news filters that determine what is reported in the media. The authors portray how Televisions, newspapers, and radio use their techniques to distort news events. They attribute this to highly concentrated media ownership and explain why they do very little aggressive reporting. The book shows that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Interestingly the model exploits the reasons why sex, forbidden topics, and violence on television are not examples of moral decay. Finally Manufacturing consent is a compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions in American foreign policy of the past quarter century. It argues out that the commercialization of news and the stringent operation of the media having it's roots in the political affiliation of the media owners.

I am writing this review in response to Ryan S. Peirce's comment about "Manufacting Consent". I m shocked that he claims to have read the book. I am all for constructive and informed debate, but you are way off on this one. I quote: "What do you get when you combine a conspiratorial 'their out to get us' mindset with a decent written book? A bunch of yahoo's either sad about thier lives or feeling guilty about what they have who blame the rich for everything (and then ignorantly assume you listen to Rush Limbaugh if you disagree with them). I give it 2 extra stars for being well written; it is a pretty package and disguises its ranting ok. Of course the media is biased; towards the political beliefs of the reporters. Not towards the rich, not towards the liberals. Sure, most reporters are democrats. But its no conspiracy. And to suggest that its biased for the rich is even more rediculous. --. "
Ryan: Money makes the world go around, it isn't a conspiracy your right, its the truth. The rich control everything, as to keep their power and privilege. And need I remind you that reporters are in the upper bracket, and make political connections with others to push their political agendas, but NEVER think that our problem is a bunch of corrupted news reporters!!! Think of it this way, if it was you who was reaping the benefits of a capitalist society, would you not use your immense privilege to keep it that way? It isn't a secret that this sort of thing happens all the time, so don't call it ridiculous conspirator dribble, call it the 21st centuries way of life. If you want a indepth reporting on just how much this happens I suggest you pick up "Stupid White Men" by Micheal Moore. But in the mean time, if you wish to critique one of our worlds great political intellectuals, you'd better get your facts straight.

20 years after the publication of this book, we can see that Herman and Chomsky were almost entirely accurate in their assessment of the mass media in the US. If anything, they perhaps did not go far enough in articulating where media control, and control of the public mind in general were headed.

As with all Chomsky books, this one can be a bit dry, especially if you are not accustomed to reading this type of material. If that is the case, I strongly recommend that you download any of his lectures on this topic. Most were given between 1989 and 1991, and are readily available using the google. The documentary adaptation of the material in this book is also a good starting place if the book is just too dense.

As an interesting aside- it is very interesting to see the current "health care reform" debate taking place in summer 2009. The exact same issues were discussed almost 20 years earlier by Chomsky, and his understanding of them has proven to be entirely predictable and accurate. "Politically unrealistic" and "politically impossible" are words associated with the "reform" despite the fact that as Chomsky points out, over 75% of the public want what is now being called "the public option". (This is not a value judgement on Chomsky's opinions but rather validation of his understanding of political discourse in the US.)

There really can be not rational debate about the stunning accuracy of of this book, 20 years after publication. History has shown that he was absolutely correct, though this is clearly no victory given what those predictions mean.

There's no other way to summarize this book for me other than to say that this is tough book to read. A meager 300 pages (in book terms, that's meager enough), this book still took me months of passive reading to get through. While not entirely a fair statement, it is somewhat representative of how thick this book can get at times. While imparting the reader with a perspective that they may not have previously had, it also wastes a lot of space saying the same thing over and over again. By the end, the book isn't saying anything you haven't read 12 (or more) times before.

To summarize, the book is an in-depth discussion of the media's role in shaping public opinion, shaping the news, and how it fails to live up to the commonly accepted position as an objective observation element. I don't think the average person denies that media has gone beyond the bounds of basic objective reporter. However, this takes it to a whole new level. Whether or not you agree is up to you, if you choose to read the book.

The book starts by describing the basic foundation of the media. Specifically, it details how content can be shaped by ownership, reader consumption and/or desired consumption, income considerations, and sourcing. By "sourcing", I refer to the contention that the vast majority of media sources are government feeds, either overtly or discreetly. Given the resource constraints of most media outlets, government propaganda is an easy way to get, at the very least, one side of any story. Even ignoring Chomsky's tendency of overbearance, it does certainly beg the question of media objectivity.

The remainder of the book is story after story showing examples of the media catering, willingly or not, to what the government wants them to say. Due to deadlines and limited resources, government officials are the easiest and cheapest way to cite a "reliable" source, where the reliability of said source brings into question the idea of conflict of interest. In the end, there probably is no conflict, since media outlets are geared to make money, as opposed to the misconception that media institutions exist to seek the truth. The government's goal of forwarding their agenda does not run counter to the media outlet's goal. This key concept is forgotten in most attacks against the media.

All of these issues (and more) are brought to the attention of the reader in great detail. Having said that, this book is tough to read, often times bogging down in poorly constructed paragraphs that plod along with no real direction. The book is not written to be read, per se, so much as it stands as a representation of the author's ideas which make it to the pages trough whatever words came to mind while writing it. There's a big discrepancy here, as many ideas of the book are lost in the sea of imprecise prose. While some may be able to ignore this in light of the truth it attempts to bring to light, I am not. A book needs to be both potent and readable for me to really enjoy it.

What this translates to is such. The book is a fair read but I found it difficult to pick it up for more than 2-3 pages at a sitting. Anything more than that resulted in my losing attention. Repeated attempts to consume greater portions of the book only resulted in drowsiness and lack of focus. For me, it became a burden to try and finish the book. In the end, that's how I rate a book. Is it easy to ascertain what the writer has to say, or do I find myself struggling to concentrate?

A decent book that needs to be read in small doses.

The first section on the Propaganda model and the concluding chapter is a very interesting read, however I found the case studies in the remaining chapters far to drawn out. Each chapter in 2-5 just felt as if Herman was going in circles belaboring the same point over and over again. 3/5 stars - Interesting read but much more wordy than it needs to be.

Finally, a clear and complete guide to understand how the media works in democratic systems. The theories presented in this book (and thoroughly demonstrated with abundant case studies) can be applied at a daily basis to understand why mainstream media report what they report, and keep an ominous silence about the rest. The authors' theories fit so well, and with such accuracy, the actions of the media (the reporting on the war in Iraq, torture cases, and so on being just recent examples) that it is not just eye-opening, but profoundly revealing.

If you want to gain a better understanding of the world around you and the workings of the propaganda system that is tightly wrapped around every citizen in this country, this book is an essential and vital tool.

ESSENTIAL READING!

As a dissident, when I'm talking to people about politics and reporting atrocities that the U.S. has been involved in, disbelief is typically the response I get. People find it hard to believe that our county (typically portrayed in the media as the good and selfless defender of the free world against totalitarianism and extremism in our international affairs) could be engaged in things that we only hear about the "bad guys" being involved in. People also seem to find it unlikely that things like that would slip by the scrutiny of the press, typically portrayed as the watchdog of the government. The fact that people make these assumptions shows that there is a system at work which distributes favorable perspectives of our governmental system.

Propaganda is prevalent in society in varying degrees of subtlety and part of its incredible efficacy, is that people aren't aware of it. But rather than looking at it in an oversimplified form of: the ignorant lambs vs. the evil deceivers; I think it's more effective in understanding the system to look at it like this: people and businesses tend to act in their own interests rather than the common interest. This book is very effective in explaining a complex system of information control that is at play in our country.

Public opinion can be shaped through news media simply by what news companies decide is and isn't news and what are and aren't relevant details in a story, or by choosing to put a story in a historical context or covering it subjectively.

I think that even a conservative or a skeptic of this type of literature can read this book and gain insight into our media. What it reveals rather than a conspiracy, is media system that functions to serve the interests of those who own it. Thus news media tends to reflect the interests of the business community and preserving their interests, rather than morality and the common good. Journalists that don't adapt to the mold that is cast for them tend to be weeded out; those who conform can go on to be quite successful.

After reading this book you will have a general understanding of how to interpret media because examples they cover come up all the time in one form or another and will continue to. Hopefully after you're done reading it when you approach dissident information rather than dismissing it because it doesn't feel right, you'll look at who is more likely to have an agenda and who will benefit by influencing you to think a certain way.

Noam Chomsky, in his own style,unleashes various filters that content have to go through before getting published. Talk of Content Management here!
Corporate Business Houses, Advertisement Revenues, anti-communism (RED fear) have affected the way the information is sourced and massaged for public consumption. Infact, the source of the information is given the highest respect so as to keep the flow of information (massaged) smooth.
The media in the US acts as a propoganda machinery rather than as a information house.
The book will allow the reader to clearly demarcate the boundary between the US Government and the public. This demarcation is essential in understanding the media's objective to mislead the American public on range of issues including foreign policy, economics and third world pseudo democracies.
In fact, the movie "Insider" is a good complement to this book.

"Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a superb indictment of the news media's subservience to elite, corporate power and its ongoing betrayal of the public's trust - especially when dealing with American foreign policy. "Manufacturing Consent" is in many ways an appendix to Robert McChesney's "Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy" as Herman and Chomsky posit that "the societal purpose of the media is to... defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state." A must-read for anyone under the illusion that the media is an adversarial, liberal or democratic institution.

And Chomsky provides many of them. Chomsky has great faith in the people's ability to determine their own interests and judge complex issues IF THEY ARE GIVEN FACTUAL INFORMATION. In the book, he DEMONSTRATES how the U.S. media failed to give full and factual information regarding Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, to name a few.
He's on record as saying that the facts of the holocaust are so clear that it makes no sense to debate them. His relation to Robert Faurisson is that he defended him from persecution for his ridiculous beliefs. Chomsky said, "You either believe in freedom of speech for those ideas you detest or you don't believe in freedom of speech." Pretty radical, huh?
In the book itself, he describes the media's body count in Cambodia, which ranged from tens of thousands to 2 million. His main criticism of the media on this subject was their relative silence on the atrocities occuring simultaneously in Ea! st Timor (the CIA called it the worst genocide in relation to population since the holocaust). But, since our political and economic ally, Indonesia, was committing the genocide there, the press saw little need to report it.
This is the essence of the book. To dismiss it, without addressing ANY of the documented facts within, as "conspiracy theory" is, at best, intellectually weak, and at worst, dishonest.
Chomsky believes in an informed public to such a degree that it makes those who would "represent" the masses a little nervous.

This is the best political book you will ever read. Forever after, you will be the smartest person in the room when people start to talk about the "liberal media" and other such nonsense. I read it in 1988, and it was like taking the red pill in The Matrix--it changed my life forever. Reading this book is the best cure, a way to instantly stop being a zombie.

This magnificently researched academic study by Herman and Chomsky is a milestone and should be studied by the editorial staff of every newspaper in the western "democracies." It's a challenging read, given our collective assumptions about other people and other cultures and the "role" of the United States in world affairs. And it's especially tough to digest in the face of the media's ongoing campaign to propagate those very assumptions, false though they may be, to their audiences. Manufacturing Consent is well worth the time and energy.

This book presents a "propaganda model" which is designed to predict (and has held up remarkably well) what stories will be covered by the press and what ones will go uncovered. The model is made by filters, which a story must pass through - the more filters a story collides with the less likely it'll be covered. The problem with the model is that it's nothing new - it explains what we've already known; that victims of the state get less coverage and victims of our enemies are exaggerated. But, no new insight will arise about what causes it (editors blocking the story, journalistic incompetence, etc.) and it might be naive to think anything one model can, because circumstances are highly individual.

Furthermore, the rest of the book (which is just individual analyses of overseas conflicts and how they were depicted back home) hardly addresses the model - because it can't. The only way a book could have incorporated the thesis (propaganda model) would be to investigate what at home, in the newsbereaus went wrong. Instead, the authors examine overseas situations and who the media sided with. Regardless of your views about whether Chomsky's and Herman's view of the truth about these situations is, the model seems like an excuse to write about these overseas situations.

With that being said, the book is very helpful in describing what really happened overseas, particularly Indochina and Central America. Not only will you learn a lot about what actually happened, but also about the unreported and misreported events.

Don't get the book to understand anything more about how the media operates (you'll learn nothing new). Get the book if you want another side to the presented overseas situations. This newer edition talks about the IMF and World Bank protests in 1999 and 2000, and also the Kosovo Crisis.

This is a fantastic work. The authors put out a model in the standard scientific mode, and proceed to test their model against available data. All such data, the media coverage of three seperate 'events', is documented indepth. They prove their model to a very high degree.
The first chapter is somewhat dense, and in spots this is true elsewhere. Also, at times the writting gets somewhat emotional, but that can hardly be faulted when you look at the subject matter.
Personally I have always felt that the media leaves things unsaid, that news stories break and unfold to a rhythm that is just out of sight. Something else besides 'breaking news' is what drives what we see and read in the dailies. Chomsky and Herman not only show that those feelings are right, but prove them in a scientifically rigorous fashion.
The chilling part of this work is that it was published before the Clinton era. The main theme is one of the media being used as an adjunct to our foreign policy, making it easier to for the US to commit what we would othewise call autrocities, etc.; thing we typically expect of Third World dictatorships and their propaganda machines. It is horrifically clear that the 'powers' turned those same techniques against their political, cultural and ideological enemies within America during the last decade. If anything, the 'dominant' sectors of society have refined their methods, subverting the 'free press' into outright tools for advancement of their cause, in deteriment to a civil, democratic society.
I would like to see the authors give an update to this work, taking into account the impeachment, the Presidential election and the subsequent powerplays. I doubt it would be published.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomksy's "Manufacturing Consent" is an alarming, disturbing, and finally brilliant exploration of the political-economic realities of American media. Armed with a solid hypothesis and reems of empirical data, the authors thoroughly debunk every myth that leads us to believe that American journalists and news reports are liberal, impartial, independent, or even remotely accurate in their presentation of "fact." Herman and Chomsky study the media the way that a biologist would study an organism; they apply scientific method and rigorous structural analysis to come up with theories, experiments, and conclusions. In the end, they expose the media for what it really is: an organ of state power through which the elite manipulate, control, and exploit the masses. If you're interested in unhooking your intellect from the American propaganda machinery, "Manufacturing Consent" is the place to start.

As an avid Chomsky reader (cf. my other reviews), it is not surprising that I am fascinated with this book. Chomsky et al. confidently and carefully disect the actual construction of the media outlets. They ask questions I am yet to see elsewhere: who OWNS the media? Who PAYS for the words you see on a newspaper or hear on the tube? This book changed my views radically when I first read it (the book can be read 2-3 times a year for life in my opinion). Until I read this book, I assumed that the product of a newspaper was just that, the newspaper. However, as the authors point out this is not the case. The product of a newspaper is the reading audience, who are then sold by the newspaper to advertisers. As Chomsky has pointed out, newspapers do not make money from the 30 or 40pence you pay for a paper, after all, they are happy to post it on the internet for free. The media institutions are answerable to the advertisers who ultimately pay for the media and thus allow it to continue.
Through diligent examination of various case studies, Chomsky and Herman demonstrate other factors which influence and blur news reporting. My advice is as follows: buy the book, read it, consider the arguments and the case studies presented, and then apply the principles of the propaganda model to your own favourite newspaper or TV news programme. Don't be surprised however if you never believe a word you read or are told again. For this book is about critical thinking. It deals with awakening your innate skills of critical analysis. Chomsky and Herman do not ask, nor expect, you just to accept what they tell you; rather they request you look at the evidence yourself and come to your own conclusion. Walter Lippmann said that when everyone is thinking the same, then no one is thinking. Think about that.

I found this book to be extremely informative and absolutely essential in todays world of non-stop 24 hour American news inculcating the fear of "terrorists" and the pursuit of material wealth into our brains. The authors provide the reader with loads of details, taking you on a tour of history you may or may not be familiar with ( namely, real history not just American cowboy bravado we get on tv and the press).
My only criticism of the book is that it reminds me to much of a college essay, the way it is formatted and written makes it a bit dry in some places. But all in all I highly recommend this book, pick it up!

I totally disagree with the statement that recent coverage disproves his thesis. It PROVES his thesis because it was only under pressure(for the last 10 years)from human rights activists did the US stop supporting Indonesia. An excellent read, especially considering the fact that new evidence has come to light that America PURPOSELY bombed the Chinese emabassy. Evidence that was widly reported in Canada, Britain, Italy, Australia, Ireland,Germany, France and the rest of the world but covered up by the US media.

The one great pleasure about reading Herman and Chomsky's works is their scholarly approach. They reference copiously, thus empowering the reader to go deeper into the subject. I've listened to idiots rebuff Manufacturing Consent by suggesting it's one big conspiracy theory. Having read this book, I can, with certainty, conclude that those people have either never opened the book, or they held it upside down when they read it. What's patent about these writers' works is the growing gap between the intellectually rich and the rest of the population (the "sheeple"). You have incisive analysts who can tell the wheat from the chaff, and then there's the majority, who are busy watching football and studying the President's sexual habits. But, when you read manufacturing consent, you find out that this disparity is an output desired by those who govern, for it makes their job easier. In other words, they've introduced a new definition of democracy that says it's a system where a mighty few run the show and the rest are spectators.

Okay, this is one of the most thought provoking and insightful pieces I have ever read. Read it for a Marxist class in college and I must say, this book really opened my suburban, white bread eyes as to the ways of the world and the mirrored reality of the media. Granted, it did make me a bit paranoid, but well worth the read. One of the few college textbooks I read cover to cover and ahead of schedule. Noam Chomsky is amazing, this man has become my idol. I consider this book my bible. WOW!!!!

Manufacturing Consent is a landmark piece of scholarship. I hesitate to name any work in the Chomsky and Herman canon as the "best," but I lean toward Manufacturing Consent as the most important work that either of them has produced. I have seen many pathetic criticisms that their work has received (like several on this review page), and I have never seen any of them hold any water. Their criticisms say a lot more about the critics than they do Manufacturing Consent. Manufacturing Consent demonstrates how truly "free" we are in America. Like Chomsky has said, when the apparatus of the state cannot unleash violence with impunity to control the masses, then the ruling class has to control what people think. Manufacturing Consent is virtually unanswerable in its scholarship, and I have never seen anybody make a worthy attempt to answer it. I would be embarrassed to have written the kinds of brainless criticisms that I have seen directed toward their work.
The only worthy criticism that I have seen directed toward Manufacturing Consent was made by Chomsky himself, when he noted that the fifth media filter, anticommunism, was too specific and has made the book dated. Chomsky said (In The Common Good, pp. 41-42), "I thought at the time it was put too narrowly. More broadly, it's the idea that grave enemies are about to attack us and we need to huddle under the protection of domestic power. You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what's really happening to them." With the "Communist Conspiracy" gone, the U.S. fear mongers have had to dredge lower and lower to conjure those malevolent threats to our "great nation" like Saddam Hussein, Nicaraguan farmers, drug dealers, etc. It might be evil extraterrestrials next year. Hey, whatever works.
I used Manufacturing Consent as an important part of my education into how the media works. I devote much of my writings to the issue of the media and history, and how we are being lied to. I have a new 1,000-page web site up which deals with the issues of Manufacturing Consent in great depth, especially regarding my experiences, which are a case study of media manipulation. I had a business partner who spent years behind bars in America as a political prisoner for daring to try to revolutionize the energy industry.

Manufacturing Consent is a great work. I have to thank Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman for doing all the research and asking all the right questions.
I've read Chomsky say something along the lines that it is the most obvious questions - the questions that a child would ask - that are too often ignored. I agree with that. This book supports your inquisitive inner child, but treats you like an adult. Like you can handle the truth. And the sheer respect between reader and author that results creates a healthy dialogue. Chomsky and Herman invite skepticism. I don't think they would have it any other way, since they are natural born skeptics themselves.
To me, this mutual respect is the most important part of the book. I don't think Chomsky and Herman could easily pull the wool over your eyes even if they were trying, because they are talking about something we are all familiar with: ideas and the media that propagates these ideas. It surrounds us just like the air we breath. How many of us don't read a newspaper headline, catch a soundbyte on the news, or unintentionally check out an advertisement at least once a day? Close to none. Just to admit that the media is such a huge part of our daily lives in the US is to admit that it must play an enormous role in the way we think. But have you ever analysed what ideas are being presented by the media for you to think about? And is it a healthy spectrum of diverse sources giving you unbiased information by which to create your opinions? I think we could all agree that the media is anything but unbiased. Still, distracting our attention from this sense of bias many of us feel exists in the media, we also have contradictory ideas about journalistic integrity, democracy, and freedom of speech that our society hold as virtues of the media. Consider the New York Times motto, "all the news that's fit to print..." if a subject doesn't get into the NYTimes, then it can't be that important, right?
After reading Manufacturing Consent, experiencing the way mass media works, having noticed many pieces of what Herman and Chomsky are analysing, I too now question the journalistic integrity, democracy, and freedom of speech present in our national and local media. I don't think there's anywhere near as much as we would all like and is possible. We need more dissenters like Chomsky and Herman. People with a critical eye, who won't be satisfied until we all get what we deserve, our humanity fulfilled. Something better than this world where few rule and many suffer. None of us should be sheep. I truly believe that within everyone exists the means to understanding this world and we can help each other and ourselves feel less lost. Noam Chomsky particularly has been an excellent resource for me in this endeavor to understand what is going on in a seemingly crazy world. Read this, or see the movie (I found a place to rent the video, so you probably can too), and decide for yourself. And then add some feedback of your own.

I think that the vast majority of people living in America believe that the media is in some way bias. Many would also say that political, economical, and governmental interests influence the media, but in a democratic society, such influence has its limits and is legitimate in the capitalistic world we live in. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky set out to analyze such media distortions and censorship-what types of news, which items, and how they are reported-in this book in a scholarly manner and challenge "the democratic postulate.. that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived."
"Manufacturing of Consent" is very much stylized as an investigational- polemical form; a thesis backed by its arguments and evidence. The first paragraph of the book sets out its main thesis " The mass media serves as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general public. It's their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interests, to fulfill his role requires systematic propaganda". Herman and Chomsky employ the model they developed "Propaganda Model" as a framework to test and explain this performance of the American media with its systematic propaganda and censorship; while their investigation is limited to only a few individual cases--three 1980s Central American elections, the alleged 1981 KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope, and the Indochina Wars -- their model is testable and can be applied and modified to a variety of events. The model is divided among 5 basic filters through which "raw news' is passed through in order to become newsworthy.
The first filter is "the size, ownership and profit orientation" of the media. Since the book was published in 1988 and all its content is from that time period, the filter is explained through the "fact" that large transnational businesses and corporations own much of the mass the media (Advance Publication, Cox Communications, Mc-Graw-Hill, NY Times, Westinghouse). The premise for this is that in 1986 there were 25,000 media entities in all in the U.S-radio, newspaper, TV, book publishers- yet 29 of the largest media systems account for over half of the outputs of the newspaper, magazines, broadcasting, books, and movies. This conglomeration into 29 top tier media systems has resulted from a trend of centralization that has increased in the post WWII rise of TV and national networking era. These large media companies are very much large, profit-seeking corporations that face the pressures of all other businesses-stockholders, directors, markets, and bankers- to focus on the bottom line; revenue. Decreased regulation and restriction on mass media by loosening of rules limiting media concentration, cross ownership, and control by non-media companies has allowed for this trend of centralization toward greater integration of the media in the market system, posing a threat "to the unrestrained commercial use of the airwaves".
Secondly, "the advertising license to do business" is the second filter. Before the province of advertising, the price of a newspaper used to cover the costs of doing business, however, with the introduction of press advertising, papers that attract ads could afford a copy price much cheaper than the production cost, in effect putting the former out of business and the latter dominating today's media; press advertising. So with advertising, the free market does not create a neutral system with buyers choice deciding; rather it's the advertisers choice that ultimately influences the content of the media that they buy and pay for- the "patrons" that provide for the media subsidy. With the "selling message" in mind, advertisers will want to avoid the more intraquite and complex controversies that interfere with the "buying mood", seeking a more entertaining slant that keeps the viewers interest heightened. One example of this in today's news TV stations are the fancy studios with their lights, background music, attractive anchors, and the edits and borders on the screen. Also more recently, this is what caused the TV station HLN to become popular culture- celebrity gossip- "news" channel.
Thirdly, "Sourcing Mass-Media News" is a crucial filter in which "a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest." Media agencies can't afford reporters and cameras everywhere, so economics dictates that they concentrate their sources where significant news often occur, where important rumors and leaks break, and where regular news conferences are held. The main sources that the media relies on are the White House, Pentagon, and State Department for two main reasons: they produce a large volume of material that suits well with the demands of news organizations scheduled flow of coverage, and because they are considered credible sources, the news organizations maintain their image of objectivity in having a trust with the audience and to deter or reduce costs from libel suits/criticism and investigative expenses. The problem with this is that that these three main sources have their own agendas and haven't been very forthcoming in that time with their involvement with Ecuadorian and Salvadorian elections in the 1980's, alleged KGB-Bulgarian Plot, and Indochina Wars (provided with a volume of evidence) and, yet the news proliferators-NY Times, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, - still relied on these "experts" as their sources of information, becoming less an investigative body and more a loudspeaker for propaganda.. This all develops into the classic "revolving door" between the media outlets and government, ultimately influencing public perception of foreign affairs and setting the agenda. Such a "symbiotic relationship" of "..Reciprocity of interest" as mentioned earlier, results in the censorship, selection, and bias of information and events that have resulted in the deaths of millions and spurred the phenomena of "worthy and unworthy" victims in news coverage. A far cry from a democratic none totalitarian system we Americans prize our country as being.
Fourthly, we as people finally have some say as the "flak and enforcers". Negative responses to media statements in the form of letters, telegrams, petitions, law suits, speeches, and bills before congress (punitive action) amounts to costs that must be accounted for and so influencing media coverage. Contrary to how I presented this as "we as people" having such power, it's overwhelmingly produced by large individuals or groups with "substantial resources". Some examples are the American Legal Foundation, the Media Institute, Freedom House, and Accuracy in Media (the more prominent politically funded think-tank's and monitors), but some of the larger producers of flak are also the White House and FCC. This flak forces advertisers to not offend their constituencies because outright boycotts could be held against them and as this model and for most things in the world for that matter, revenue and agenda would be lost. As a result to avoid this, stories are spun and distorted in order to minimize flak fallout and at the same time seriously compromising its integrity. So if certain programs are thought to elicit controversy resulting in flak then as a result they will be negated and avoided. This ability for flak to be produced yet again "reinforces the command of political authority in its news-management activities; sadly.
The last filter is one that has been slightly enhanced-"Anti-communism as a control mechanism"- reflecting the era at the end of the Regan year's in which the book was written, however, implying any prevailing ideology. At the books time, communism the was unequivocally prevailing evil and so across the land (America) property owners were threatened of their class positions and superior status of such Marxists, egalitarian ideologies. The abuses of the Communists in China, Russia, and Cuba were well publicized and used to develop opposition to communism to a first principle of western ideology and politics in very much a fear tactic style as occurred with McCarthyism; a sort of nationalistic religion. The concept is to mobilize a the population against and enemy, and since it's such an abstract concept, it can be used against who supports accommodation with Communists or policies threatening property interests (the left most the time); not even being those who challenge the notion of anti-communism. Assumptions behind ideologies are rarely challenged and are accepted by the masses, and what allows power and political elite to manipulate the country for or against the countries (governments) enemy; a process of manufacturing consent. Today, such ideologies that persist are "the war on terror", "Extremist Muslims", and "Osama Bin-Laden"; not all necessarily being illegitimate threats.
"Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman "games of the Circus" that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo". One of the underlying themes from this quote (which is from the book) and the entirety of the book that can be taken is the cliché that history repeats itself--in such a fashion that if we don't challenge the assumptions of how our world works, come to terms with the inherent human interest we all have to some extent for ourselves, the many influencing factors and " selling messages" that infiltrate our lives unconsciously, and that truth shouldn't be marginalized a being merely relative; all themes form the inception of humanity. And this scholarly feat by Herman and Chomsky present this all in an objective fashion in their timelessly supported "Propaganda Model" of past events, but most importantly for future events that will directly effect us.

A tour de force, co-authored by one of the world's leading experts on language and meaning.@In this book, Herman and Chomsky put forward a "propaganda model" to explain the bias in Western (mostly US) media on international affairs. Their thesis is that, although the US is not a dictatorship where a single leader can censor the press, the very market forces that lead people to believe in the freedom of their press actually work to create a self-imposed censorship which creates a biased media, more intent on delivering audiences to their advertisers and vital corporate sponsors than in providing their readers with balanced and informed news.@The authors back up their theory with a large number of examples, and focus on 3 main topics: Latin America, Vietnam and the attempt on the life of the Pope in 1981. Using extensive quotations from US contemporary media reports, and comparing them with official sources such as government documents, White House memos, State Department press releases, as well as reports in non-US-based media, Herman and Chomsky are able to bolster their thesis of a propaganda model, and show that US media reports are nearly always skewed to show the US and its allies as the "good guys", and other (enemy) states as the "bad guys". When "they" do it, it's called "terrorism", when "we" do it, it's called "fighting for democracy and freedom."
Such a statement seems too blatantly simplistic to require serious consideration; nevertheless, the authors do give it very serious consideration, and the evidence they have scrupulously collected is hard to refute. Moreover, their propaganda model helps to explain why and how this can be so, even (indeed, particularly) in a "free democracy": a number of filters act to screen out unwelcome aspects of news.
A startling eye-opener, very well researched and cogently, passionately argued. These authors care intensely about lives lost due to state-sponsored violence, whether that state is the US or the Soviet Union or anywhere else. A must-read for students of media and communication, and indeed any intelligent reader curious about the forces that shape what actually appears in their newspapers and television news.

One of Chomsky's best if for no other reason than it is painstaking detailed, referrenced, and generally scholarly.

I believe nearly all of Chomsky's works are well thought out, well reasoned, and well written. He ties together events and history masterfully, often using little more than (as he's mentioned in at least one book) a high school intellect and a newspaper. That's all you need to understand the world.

Manufacturing Consent is one of his best both for the subject matter, for media control limits our ability to understand the nuances of the world around us and for it's presentation, it is, like I mentioned, more scholarly than most of his political work. It has a discernable thesis, it progresses by argument and example and does not suffer from some of the assumptions of prior knowledge that a few or his collected political essays do.

Overall a top choice for anyone. Couldn't give it 5/5 because, though generally well written, it is inexcusably dense and repetitive in places where it doesn't need to be.

This is the one Chomsky book to read if you're going to read only one. It's a scathing indictment of the "free" press, packed with a massive amount of carefully documented evidence. The focus throughout is on the nature of pro-establishment propaganda foisted on the public by the elite print media, primarily the New York Times and Washington Post. The authors painstakingly compare the editorial positions and news biases of leading media with the information available through third parties (typically foreign or smaller-scale U.S. media) and find that the elite print media are slanted far in favor of official Washington policy--with journalistic integrity and independence pushed aside.

A modern classic in political science, Manufacturing Consent does a thorough job presenting a case against journalistic objectivity. With a hefty amount of scholarship and clarity, Chomsky ("arguably the most important intellectual alive", according to the New York Times) and Herman illustrate the incentive structures of the mass media (their analysis was published before the popularization of the internet) and how such structures lead to collusion between the press and government. In other words, many of us are unwitting victims of government proganda aimed at maintaining the existing power structure. As much as it sounds like a conspiricy theory, don't dismiss it until you have read it. Chomsky and Herman present a compelling propaganda model that, while you may not agree with the conslusions completely, may give you further insight into the machinations of the democracy that we are all live in.

This volume does an excellent job of debunking many popular media myths. The one thing that MUST be said is that the authors extensively document their points, using a trail of facts that are at times astounding in showing how the media's coverage reflects our society's "best interests" as determined by the powers that be. I was most struck by how the media essentially reports U.S. government sources as being infallible, but questioning the motives of our "rivals." While the entire book had very interesting points, I found the section on Latin America most accessible, as I was best able to recall the news coverage at the time and how it really fit the... model proposed by the authors quite closely. Don't dismiss this book because its authors are labeled as "liberal" -- check out the book and decide for yourself based on the facts presented within.

This book, along with the Godfather, is what inspired me to study Political Science at UCLA. His thesis, that the American Media is a mouthpiece for corporate and pentagon interests, is backed up with so much information and data, all footnoted, that after a while I was skimming through, thinking "all right already! I believe you!" And it's all presented in a delightfully intelligent matter. A perfect intellectual endeavor in a political forum which is generally too dominated by mudslinging and character assassinations to get any real ideas.

The whole book tries to demonstrate how the mainstream media works within a propaganda framework, following the directrices from its government and only allowing criticism in very narrow grounds.

For the excercise on hand, they focus on three areas: Central America during the 80's , Indochina (Vietnam war) and the attempted murder of the Pope.

From these 3 cases, the Vietnam war is no doubt the most astonishing. Chomsky and Herman point out in the book (referring to the broad consensus in the media that the U.S. went there to do good when in fact the U.S army killed few million people for cynical reasons):

"We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary, far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system (...) Even more revealing with regard to Western intellectual culture is that the simple facts cannot be perceived, and their import lies far beyond the bounds of the thinkable"

... Have a read, it will not let you down.

Ed Herman has often written quietly behind Chomsky's bigger name but he's no less important a messenger and translator of American media and foreign policy bias and hypocrisy. Manufacturing Consent is a withering analysis of these "inconvenient truths." Herman and Chomsky's important writings, both as collaborators and individuals, have been largely ignored by the mainstream press for the last 40 years, affirming, ironically, their very thesis. If you read this book undefensively, putting aside your biases, you will experience Kierkegaard's "fear and trembling." If you read Ed Herman's other books, you'll appreciate why he's not more widely known, but should be.

This book thoroughly dissects the propaganda structure and extinsively covers many examples to back up his claims. For the patriot, it is almost painfull to read at times, sanity of this calibre. I highly recomend it to anybody who likes to learn and wants a true picture of society.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky provide a radical critique of the American Mass Media through the formulation and testing of a "propaganda model." This propaganda model states that, contrary to popular opinion and conservative thinking, the media does not have a liberal or anti-establishment bias. The Mass Media is owned largely by wealthy individuals, banks, and corporate interests. The media depends upon the state for information and assistance in its day-to-day operations. Thus, free-market forces cause the media to adopt a bias in favor of corporate interests, government interests, and the status quo in general. The "Propaganda Model" is tested out on a variety of foreign affairs matters, ranging from Nicaragua to the "Plot to Kill the Pope" to Vietnam to East Timor. In between, a few comments on domestic affairs such as the FBI's intrusions and Watergate are thrown into the mix. Chomsky is a brilliant scholar and analyst, and his theory largely holds up under investigation. The propaganda model demonstrates how a free press such as our own can produce more influential and effective propaganda than a press with state censorship such as that of Communist countries. However, Chomsky's conclusions are difficult to swallow: The independent media which Chomsky prefers is biased based on the ideology of those doing the publishing, and therefore no better than the mainstream media in terms of fairness or accuracy. On page 299, Chomsky argues that the break-ins and harassment by the FBI of the Socialist Worker's Party were covered up by the media because the SWP represents no powerful interests. It is just as likely that few newspaper readers would be interested in the fate of a tiny, unpopular political organization. Finally, the propaganda model fails to take one factor into account: Perhaps the reason why people accept media distortions is that they WANT to be convinced that the government is doing right by the people, that our country is honorable and decent compared to our foes, and that the status quo is acceptable. Humans have a basic psychological desire to be convinced of such things, and a media that screamed about corruption and inequality would be unpopular indeed. In short, Chomsky's writing is thoroughly readable and his biting analysis is a must-see for Americans interested in how their media operates. Just look upon his analysis and conclusions with an open, yet critical, mind.

I'm sure Chomsky & Herman have made an excellent case, but after the characteristics of their propaganda model have been defined in the first chapter, the next three hundred pages become a tiresome list of examples illustrating their point. The numbing predictability this produced meant that I was unable to finish the book. It does not help either that the book was written in such dessicated prose. It illustrates an important point and it's some feat of research, but it's a pity it's so dull.

This book reveals well how difficult it is for democracies to maintain an informed citizenry when the news media are so prone to political manipulation and economic pressures. An important argument, regrettably weakened by some careless (NOT dishonest) scholarship.

You'll never see the mass media the same again. This book shouldn't make you hate the evening news or your local paper, but it will force you to see them with a more critical eye. A healthy dose of skepticism.

Finally, a clear and complete guide to understand how the media works in democratic systems. The theories presented in this book (and thoroughly demonstrated with abundant case studies) can be applied at a daily basis to understand why mainstream media report what they report, and keep an ominous silence about the rest. The authors' theories fit so well, and with such accuracy, the actions of the media (the reporting on the war in Iraq, torture cases, and so on being just recent examples) that it is not just eye-opening, but profoundly revealing.

If you want to gain a better understanding of the world around you and the workings of the propaganda system that is tightly wrapped around every citizen in this country, this book is an essential and vital tool.

ESSENTIAL READING!

It's aggravating, in a way, to come across a book that says basically what you've thought for a while, but in an unformed way. "Manufacturing Consent" should be required reading in journalism and communications school.

... this is a detailed and cogent piece of political science. Indeed its central propositions are so obvious it is difficult to see how any rational subject could object. Basically, the book is answering the question of who owns and controls the media, how its agenda is set and what this agenda typically omits. The argument uses very concrete examples, such as the exemplary comparative treatment of the US media coverage given to atrocities in Cambodia and in East Timor (a US ally). "Media" is in fact a slight misnomer (do i get brownie points for using a latinate?). Since the vast majority of people are entirely dependent on newspapers and television for their news, its not like they can "compare" its representations with some realm of brute objective fact. To talk of newspapers etc as intermediaries is therefore completely wrongheaded. Another very useful contribution from NC, the efficacy of which can be gauged by the spiteful and mendacious polemics it elicits in response.

I would say that this book is one of the most important books, even 15 years later. It dissects the mass media in a way that no other book can do. It goes into the concentration of mass media and how the media is slanted towards giving a viewpoint of the elite who controls the flow of information. There are other books out there about this phenomenon but this book has the best case examples and hits like a hammer.

When imperial Britain went on its mission of conquest, with all the rape, pillaging and exploitation entailed therein, the ruling imperial elites sold the idea that this was the White Man's Burden - the idea that what was being done was essentially a mission of mercy, a mission to bring 'civilisation' to the rogue savages of the world. It was a sick joke.
Likewise, we have an analogous situation today where the murderous deeds of US foreign policy are sold as bringing the values of 'freedom' and 'democracy' to an obstinate world which refuses to walk with us into the 21st Century. It's another sick joke, and this book is an important contribution to understanding some of the machinations of mass media which help to promote this myth.

Chomsky and Herman transcend the argument of 'liberal' or 'conservative' media to bring a well documented, amazingly detailed account of how the media is neither 'left or right' but adheres to elite opinion and the government line.
Enlightening! People caught up in the partisan media argument might want to give it a read, and read his sources as well.
5 Stars! Never read Herman before, now my interest is piqued, and this is one of the best works I've read involving Prof. Chomsky.

This is a must read if you want to understand how mainstream media in the U.S. fall prey to government propaganda and politicians' never seizing attempts to control and influence them. It reveals the limits and illusions of our freedom of the press and gives stunning examples of how the news was framed and directed by powerful political, business and military institutions in America. You do not have to agree with Chomsky's political and social concepts to appreciate this amazing book.

This is not a book on media, it is a book pushing the political agenda of the authors and is guilty of the very crime it purports to uncover.

I could not finish this book, but thought that I would write a review on what I read as I feel that the authors and the description were deceptive in terms of the book which falsely led to my wasting time trying to read it.

First and foremost this book reads as the whining of disenfranchised political operators. Although I do not mind someone pushing their agenda I reject as intellectually dishonest any approach that doe not try to provide a balanced approach by providing meaningful counter-arguments to their central thesis (their actual political position doesn't really matter in terms of how it detracts from the book).

The second issue it is not, as described, about "modern media" at all. The role of social media is non-existant. Even the role of the internet in general describes an in internet of 2001 and not 2011 when this edition was published. The utter confusion by the authors about the role of the digital age in terms of media reflects more their inability to modernise than the age of the recent edition.

The third issue is that even when the authors do discuss politics in a relevant context, i.e. how media and politics interact, they use non-conventional political definitions without any explanation, e.g. they define as democracy what most people would consider socialism. I do not care what their political views are, I do care that I do not have to guess at meanings for terms and concepts that already have a traditional definition and for which the authors do not bother giving their alternative definition.

Finally, the tone of the first few chapters at least is whining. It leaves one with the impression that they are not so much learning from scholars as putting up with the complaints of a child.

This is tedious reading and requires your undivided attention. The book does however make the reader aware of the tactics used be the media to deceive the public. You understand why some information makes the front page and some make page 15 and why some information does not get printed at all.

It also makes clear that corporate profits outweigh the public's need for accurate, timely and truthful news.

Ask yourself:

Who killed ArchBishop Oscar Romero?

How many US mercinaries are there in Saudi Arabia (or the Middle East in general)?

Why are US millitary bases spread through out the world when the Soviet Union is dead?

If you answer questions like these, then you can begin to read this book.

(If your of poor class in American, then you do not need to ask these questions because we already understand the nature of this system)

Beware: Even the new 2002 edition uses out-of-date facts. It seems the only "updating" the authors did from their original 1988 edition was a brief introduction with some new developments and facts. The main body of the book has completely useless charts and tables such as "Wealth of the Control Groups of 24 Large Media Corporations, February 1986." Media conglomeration has proliferated so much in the last nineteen years that these numbers are meaningless. There are only 5 or 6 major media companies left nowadays.

If you are interested in media analysis and criticism then this book is certainly worth reading, but beware of its inherent weaknesses and do not assume that it is an authoritative voice on the issues it raises. Herman and Chomsky have a strongly researched thesis that they call the Propaganda Model, and they apply it well to case studies in which the mass media have been found to distort the truth behind major stories to cater to elite interests. Note that this book was originally written back in 1988 so the then-current stories that the authors use to back up their Propaganda Model are no longer of much interest - such as Solidarity in Poland and US relations with Central America in the mid-80's. However, these stories are still useful and informative in relation to the Propaganda Model, and the authors show with very strong evidence that those stories were misreported (accidental) or disreported (on purpose). The reasons for this poor reporting by a supposedly free press mostly include pressure from elite corporate interests in the US (blowing away predictable complaints about a "liberal" press) and the unreasonable assumption that US government press reports are factual and can be taken at face value - when the authorities have a self-serving and self-protecting agenda like everyone else. The current edition does have a new introduction that extends the Propaganda Model into more current events, proving that the media bias is still alive and well, although the authors show a rather Luddite-like disdain for the internet.
Unfortunately, after a strong start and a very believable premise, this book breaks down steadily as it goes along. First, the authors use a very limited sample of major media outlets in their studies of the coverage of the various news events. These major outlets may have shown improper reporting, but the authors usually use just this small sample to support their thesis, completely ignoring smaller and non-establishment outlets that may have shown a less reprehensible side of the media. Another problem is the academic writing style that is meant for the peer review process rather than the enlightenment of the public. Here it is more important to endlessly pile on repetitive evidence to avoid having colleagues shoot down your thesis. This may work academically, but the concerned public reader will find an incredibly repetitive case of information overload that is low on enlightening insights.
The book takes a major downhill turn in the chapters dealing with Vietnam and Laos/Cambodia, in which the Propaganda Model is less visible in the analysis, and the authors have switched from media analysts to historians. Here it is evident that Herman and Chomsky wish to provide an alternative history of the Indochina Wars in order to make political statements, under the pretense of presenting evidence that was withheld by the biased media. These chapters are marred by unprofessional sarcasm, loaded words like "murderous" and "immoral" to describe US actions, and Chomsky's creeping conspiracy theories. The Laos/Cambodia chapter breaks down completely as the authors had already covered that area in a previous book. The chapter here ceases to be a media analysis and becomes a rebuttal of criticisms from other authors who disputed Herman and Chomsky's earlier claims. This includes a suspiciously longwinded and sarcastic debunking and condemnation of the journalist William Shawcross.
In the end, the Propaganda Model postulated by Herman and Chomsky is indeed plausible and perfectly proves media bias, but **only in the examples covered in this study**. There is little evidence of a pattern that extends across all media in all situations, which is the authors' apparent goal. In fact, corporate and government pressure on the media to toe the propaganda line is indeed a serious problem in America, but the problem is more inherent or systemic within a social system where money equals power. Digging into these systemic issues would be far more difficult and complex, but would be more enlightening than trying to find supposed conspiracies.

In this book Hermann and Chomsky seemingly attempt to define the problem of propaganda to suit a sort of microwaveable prepackaged Marxist-derived political economy solution that they seek to advance. Their title seems derived, without attribution, from the work of propagandist and public relations genius Ed Bernays written nearly a century ago. Specifically Bernays used the term "engineering of consent," Bernays, however, was an original thinker. I don't know about Hermann, but Chomsky seems to keep writing the same book over and over again, all of which can be summarized by the following paraphrase/quote from Marx: "The ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling classes." Maybe this wash of Marxian theory best suits what I presume to be Chomsky's public--bargain basement critical theorists, Occupy-Wall-Streeters and baby boomer professors on the verge of retiring to their safe suburban homes, all of whom seem insistent on viewing themselves as progressive revolutionaries. I can merely speculate on this matter, however. But the insurmountable logical difficulty of this book is that it uses one type of propaganda to attempt to analyze what it says is another. How is this intellectually valid? What I mean by this statement is that it takes Marxist-derived critical theory, itself a form of agitation propaganda that is often used to undermine a status quo political system, and then purports to analyze the social control propagandas of the big, evil capitalist West. Stuff and nonsense! I do recommend the book for its "propaganda filters" that go a good portion of the way toward explaining mass news content. I admire particularly their "flack filter" which explains how PR professionals attack their organization's enemies, a practice that has been extended even further by the newer social media. But, despite the filters, the News looks like it does, however, because it is in fact a business designed to make money. We are not talking about government-run news here or Pravda ("Truth," a great ironic name for government issued news service that was the official organ of the soviet central committee). But imagine a news system run by elite intellectuals? The only way people would watch it is if we put them in prison first. Also H&C seem to have little or no understanding of typical American informational pluralism, the nodes of information that contribute to the great flow, often by specialized anti-media. The Ten Commandments of Propaganda They erroneously see media as monolithic. The book would benefit by a fuller explanation of the content analysis methodology that seems to underlie the authors' findings. But then, maybe this would only serve to erode the book's social scientific aura of factuality." I recommend reading about the filters to my students in propaganda and persuasion classes, even though I caution them not to take H&C's causal inferences too seriously. The weakness of any content analysis based inference is that, assuming the quantitative content analysis is done correctly in the first place, in the end one can only measure manifest content. The linkage to cause may be conjectural and sometimes even whimsical. Often I think researchers merely project their own intellectual and emotional preoccupations onto the pervasive cultural fog of media coverage. I am Brian Anse Patrick, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Toledo, author of Ten Commandments of Propaganda, Rise of the Anti-Media Rise of the Anti-Media: In-forming America's Concealed Weapon Carry Movement, and The National Rifle Association and the Media The National Rifle Association and the Media (Frontiers in Political Communications).

If you're looking for a very scholarly and academic review of this book thats laden with a bunch of big words, etc., read one of the other reviews.
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.

Manufacturing Consent theorizes that the information presented to the public is put through a set of filters that determine its suitability to be broadcast and that this filtered media is what shapes our understanding of social norms, most noticeably through ownership or sponsorship of the media and the relationship between the media and those who create the news. This idea is called the "Propaganda Model" and suggests that the media is shaped and controlled by those that have made large financial investments into media outlets. Authors Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky present several examples of how media representation of the news is often skewed to reflect official interests of the United States government and the interests of large corporate media sponsors.

Throughout the nearly 400 page book (including the critical Introduction and Preface), Chomsky and Herman prove over and over that society's perception of reality is strongly correlated with the narrow reporting of news outlets as a result of the free-market economics model of media. The authors examine various case studies, all originating before the mid-1980s including the crises in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the illegitimate elections in developing nations, and the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope. In each of these cases the Propaganda Model is applied and the result, backed by scientific data, is that we, the people, were misled by the mainstream media.

Herman and Chomsky illustrate that the reporting done by mainstream media is determined by the interests of the government. Horrifying violations of human rights and governments riddled with corruption are often ignored or the scenes are downplayed because of the interests of the United States within the country. These interests are often financially motivated. Manufacturing Consent uses this theory to determine the "worth" or victims and can, with little error, predict what stories will become Front Page News compared with what stories will be editorial notes in later editions.

It seems as though my interpretation of this book is much different than most. Perhaps it is because all of the references to people, places, and events are far beyond my 21 years of life. I know these issues only as they are presented in American History text books--in an even more watered down format than the mainstream media. The quality of writing was high, the cases and the updates were impeccably researched, and the theory expertly developed and applied. And please, don't mistake my critical review of this book as ignorance, naiveté, or misunderstanding of content.

In my most humble opinion, this book is terribly outdated. By this I do not simply mean that the information is old or inaccurate in modern time but that the critical analysis of the media presented in the book is now only partially correct. The Propaganda Model, as applied to major news outlets, is still accurate and the entire system of news reporting is subject to the constant filters placed upon it by the financial sponsors. But, this book completely ignores the most common form of information sharing--the internet.

This book does not take into account the greater freedom of information afforded by the internet. Further, it does not consider the internet, specifically social networking and file sharing sites, to be a viable for media. In the last 10 years, the internet has tightened its' grasp on western society and we have become dependent on Google for everything from news to step by step instructions on home maintenance. Sites like Twitter and Tumblr have allowed people all over the world to share that they are seeing and what is happening in the world around them.

As was revealed to the world early this year in Tunisia and Egypt, the internet has a way of sharing raw news, untouched by the filters of mainstream media and exposing issues before they can be covered up. The book fails to take into account the viability of any new media sources and the freedom allowed by the internet severely wounds the creditability of the argument.

Overall, I feel as though Herman and Chomsky's model is accurate and the book illustrates just how right they were, without factoring in the internet the Propaganda Model is no longer quite as accurate or as relevant as it was when it was originally written.

Libby Hogan
Holy Names University Class of 2012

I began to read this book with some hesitation. I was aware of the reputation of Noam Chomsky as someone of erudition. I was afraid that I would not be capable of successfully following the subtle arguments of a world class intellectual. This hesitation was not justified.
Chomsky and Herman quote from Jacques Ellul's book �Propaganda' in the preface to this book. They do so without apparent insight or irony. Ellul brilliantly analyzed the nature of propaganda in his book. He noted that the purveyor of propaganda necessarily became its victim. The reader of �Manufacturing Consent' is subjected of to hundreds of pages of shrill rhetoric masquerading as analysis. Non sequiturs follow non sequiturs to support unsubstantiated claims.
There is truth in this book. However these are derivative and obvious truths. Every page of the book is filled with details designed to support the authors' thesis that the media reflects a societal viewpoint and that other viewpoints are discouraged. The surprising thing about the book is that the authors seem to think that this is some sort of novel idea. They spend hundreds of pages showing that the facts of some historical events could be interpreted differently within another viewpoint. The sad thing about this so-called analysis is that the authors present their own interpretation as the unvarnished truth as opposed to the self-serving propaganda that other viewpoints provide. The facts are myriad, the analysis is predictable and the conclusions are trite.
The authors seem not to sense the irony of quoting Ellul in a book that shows the truth of his insight that the purveyor of propaganda is one of its victims. If they had created a book that followed from Ellul's seminal insight and showed the danger that a society falls into when its core beliefs become propaganda, they could have created a significant book. However that book would not be �Manufacturing Consent.'
Society to function must have a set of core beliefs to inspire its members to cooperate on grand social aims. Members of society must be prepared to sacrifice some of their own self-interest to facilitate grander societal aims. This can range from support for the arts to aid for the indigent and sick. However as Ellul showed these core beliefs can acquire the status of emotion and become irrational. They acquire a status beyond their purpose and since they have become irrational they can be used to suppress any alternative view. Alternative views cannot be analyzed; they are a danger and so must be suppressed. Society becomes imprisoned in a straightjacket of beliefs and cannot adapt to new circumstances.
Ellul saw this. Ellul wrote a brilliant book on propaganda. The authors of this book wrote a book trying to show that their analysis of historical events is more �accurate' than that of the mass media. This may or may not be so but it is largely unimportant. The important issue is not about the motivations of some dead politicians but how a society can protect itself from its own propaganda. Ellul tried to show this. Popper tried to show this. Herman and Chomsky prove the same shallow point over and over again. They are not wrong in their ideas and assertions. It is just that they are shallow, trite, without insight and unimportant.
If you want to know about propaganda read Ellul. He said it before Herman and Chomsky. He said more than Herman and Chomsky. And he said it with insight.

What do you get when you combine a conspiratorial 'their out to get us' mindset with a decent written book? A bunch of yahoo's either sad about thier lives or feeling guilty about what they have who blame the rich for everything (and then ignorantly assume you listen to Rush Limbaugh if you disagree with them). I give it 2 extra stars for being well written; it is a pretty package and disguises its ranting ok. Of course the media is biased; towards the political beliefs of the reporters. Not towards the rich, not towards the liberals. Sure, most reporters are democrats. But its no conspiracy. And to suggest that its biased for the rich is even more rediculous.

Look up other works by Chomsky, Zinn and Ward Churchill and read the reviews. One surprisingly common theme among them is that many readers experience some kind of awakening to the "truth." These readers write as if they've awoken from a trance into a new reality, a new paradigm with which to view the world. I've heard similar exclamations about the ecstacy of spiritual awakening from Scientologists, born-again Christians and other cultists. Well in this book, Chomsky weaves a conspiracy-theory-type tale that exposes the media as the master hypnotists keeping the public (particularly in the US as media outlets in other parts of the world seems to be less insidious than those in our country and our public seems to be considerably dumber) from realizing the true evils committed by our government at home and abroad.

Now depending on Chomsky's motives, this book is either a really interesting academic exercise on the power of words in the realm of history and politics...or a sick joke. If his intent was to take much of recent history, change a few key adjectives here and there (i.e., instead of a "police action", US involvement in Indochina was an "invasion"; vigorously contested battles being lopsided "massacres") and see how easily perspective on the same events can be wildly altered, then this book is great. Read this book along with some older, more conventional histories dealing with the late 20th century and it's Rashomon all over again. Seen in this light, Chomsky truly exposes the power of words in historical discourse. However, if he's any at all serious, Chomsky should retreat into his ivory tower over at MIT and leave the writing of history to historians. In any case, I'll write the rest of the review under the assumption that he's actually serious.

The beginnings of this work seemed plausible enough. His earlier points were at least arguable. When he proceeded to blame the genocide perpetrated by the khmer rouge in Cambodia on a few B-52 strikes my head began to spin. After making this assertion he goes on to skewer the media for failing to make this link, however I think it's much more likely that the media didn't address the link because it simply didn't exist. In writing my undergraduate thesis, I compared the role of culture and norms of resistance to foreign occupation in both the Vietnam and Afghanistan interventions by the US and Soviet Union respectively, so it's not like I'm uninformed on the subject. I've also read extensively about the killing fields, and much of the blame rests squarely with pol pot himself, his cronies, as well as the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. The khmer rouge had run amok to the point in which their ideological cousins, the newly-unified communist Vietnam, felt compelled to intervene against them.

In the western (read - US) media, Chomsky sees a wicked cabal controlled by powerful corporate interests. I see people merely trying to sell papers, advertising spots, air time etc. Chomsky would have us believe that these two aims are one in the same. However, they're clearly not. For example, Chomsky goes to great pains to expose the supposed media conspiracy surrounding the attempted assassination of the pope. He claims that the media persisted in reporting on an alleged connection linking the assassin to the Bulgarian government in an attempt to discredit Bulgaria, other members of the Eastern Bloc and godless leftists everywhere. A much more plausible explanation would be that a story of international intrigue and back-alley meetings of spies and assassin was simply going to sell more papers and keep people glued to their TV. A lone wingnut acting on his own? That's boring!

Where Chomsky sees cabal, I see, at worst, laziness and perhaps a little greed. Media outlets tend to exhibit a herd mentality. When one outlet starts to follow a story, other outlets come sniffing around. Once they come sniffing around they've already expended resources and may feel compelled to make a mountain out of a molehill. If the story has got any hint of sex, murder, power and intrigue (preferably a combination of these things), the media stampedes over and camps on it for months (a la Lewinski). It must also be remembered that it's cheaper to purchase bylines off the AP wire than to send your own reporter out into the field complete with a bottomless expense account.

A simple rule of thumb I learned in law school is that when a case is brought before a judge, fairness and "objectivity" in reaching a decision will end with everyone on all sides pissed off to some degree. It's always funny to go to a bookstore and see Anne Coulter's Slander sitting a few inches away from this book. The right sees the left-wing media elite, the left sees the right-wing corporate media construct acting as a mouthpiece for rich guys sipping cognac and wearing power ties. The rule applies as much to the media as it does to the courtroom....as long as both sides are crying bloody murder, the media is probably doing its job.

This book shows clearly how the American media monopoly that controls the mass media is forming minds in a country sworn to liberty. It should be required reading in schools, just to teach children how important the

If you think there's a huge, overwhelming right wing conspiracy out there, then this is the book for you. If you've a sceptical bone in your body, consider spending your money somewhere else. This book is one part theory, five parts anecdotal evidence judiciously selected by the authors in support of their theory. Anecdotal evidence has next to no intellectual value when used to support generalisations of the sort made by Messrs Herman and Chomsky.

In buying this book I was principally interested in Chomsky and Herman's arguments, which are set out in the first chapter and a half of the book. They are conveniently set out on page 2, and I can further summarise them:

Before being published, all news in America is run (consiously or subconsciously) through the following five "filters":

1: The size, concentrated ownership and profit orientation of the Mass Media: economic barriers to entry into the media market are high, the class of media organisations is small, concentrated and cross-owned, and all media owners are driven by profit: that is, they have to print something that will sell. A less conspiracy-laden rendering of that assertion is this: if you publish something the public think is a load of rubbish, you'll go bust.

2: Advertising as a main source of income for print media. Messrs Chomsky and Herman believe it isn't so much "what will sell" as "what is will be agreeble to advertisers" which is important. They clearly think these two concepts are substantially different, but they provide no arguments at all to support that conjecture, except a single (anecdotal) instance of the failure of an apparently widely read socialist worker's paper which, for all we know, could have gone bust for any number of reasons (for example, the arrival of another, better newspaper in the market, or that its readership began to think it was publishing a pile of rubbish).

3: The reliance of the media on information provided or sponsored by government, business and other "agents of power".

4: Public and official complaint on press content as a way of disciplining the media; and

5: Anti-communism as a national religion and control mechanism.

Filter 1 has been largely eroded by this wonderful thing called the internet that has evolved since Manufacturing Consent was written. Now anyone can publish; thanks to (er... multinational corporations like) Google, anyone's views (even mine!) can be readily accessed, for better of for worse. The profit motive remains, but I don't think that having to print what the public wants to read is especially insidious, especially given how much the US public likes poorly conceived conspiracy theories. Nor should Chomsky, since that's what's made him a global superstar!

Filters 2 and 4 are pretty unobjectionable, and wouldn't be news to anyone who spent more than a moment reflecting on what the media does in any community.

Filter 3 ignores "official sources" includes things like opposition political parties, competing businesses, public interest groups, consumer organisations, and dissident commentators of extraordinarily large pulling power like, well, Noam Chomsky.

Filter 5 is comical. No reason is advanced for why anti-communism should be thought of as any more of a filter - let alone a "national religion" than anti-nazism, anti-racism, anti-muslim fundamentalist, pro-NRA, pro-abortion etc etc.

The rest of the book comprises anecdotal evidence carefully selected by the authors to support their claims. As mentioned, I don't have much time for anecdotal evidence as a basis for making enormously sweeping generalisations, so I skipped them. Manfacturing Consent was a quick read, therefore.

My advice would be to skip the book altogether, in fact.

Olly Buxton

[Robert Morrow - researcher into the 1963 Coup d'Etat. I have 250+ books related to the JFK assassination. Google my essay "LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK"]

There is no more spectacular example of the the media attempting to "manufacture consent," working hand in glove with the US government than in the cover up of the JFK assassination.

And radical left Noam Chomsky leaves that out?? Are you kidding me???

Not to mention CIA assets in the major media and the role of the Council on Foreign Relations in pushing the official line.

Maybe this is why Noam Chomsky said (in 2007 no less!) on who killed John Kennedy:

"Who knows? And who cares? I mean plenty of people get killed all of the time, why does it matter that one of them happened to be John Kennedy? If there was some reason to believe that there was a high level conspiracy it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is just overwhelming. And after that it's just a matter, if it happened to be a jealous husband or the mafia or someone else, what difference does it make?"

Wow! Mr. super genious leftwing radical critic has not figured out that the JFK assassination was a coup d'etat. Or that it matters! Dayuuuuum! Google "LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK."

Houston, we have a problem! Google and read Carl Bernstein's classic "CIA and the Media."

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
--William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."
--CIA operative, discussing the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. Katherine the Great, by Deborah Davis

"There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don't need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level."
--William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein

"The Agency's relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible."
--The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein

"Senator William Proxmire has pegged the number of employees of the federal intelligence community at 148,000 ... though Proxmire's number is itself a conservative one. The "intelligence community" is officially defined as including only those organizations that are members of the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); a dozen other agencies, charged with both foreign and domestic intelligence chores, are not encompassed by the term.... The number of intelligence workers employed by the federal government is not 148,000, but some undetermined multiple of that number."
--Jim Hougan, Spooks

"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations."
--former President Harry Truman, 22 December 1963, one month after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post, early edition

"The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business." - Lyndon Johnson

"We used to say, 'Well, Allen Dulles, he's not a good administrator or a bad administrator, he's innocent of administration'"
--Karl G. Harr

If you want to get quickly "up to speed" on the JFK assassination, here is what to read:

1) LBJ: Mastermind of JFK's Assassination by Phillip Nelson
2) JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why it Matters by James Douglass
3) Brothers: the Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot
4) The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh
5) Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty by Russ Baker.
6) Google the essay "LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK" by Robert Morrow.
7) Google "National Security State and the Assassination of JFK by Andrew Gavin Marshall."
8) Google "Chip Tatum Pegasus."
9) Google "Vincent Salandria False Mystery Speech."
10) Google "Murray Rothbard the JFK Flap"
11) Google "Bertrand Russell 16 Questions on the Assassination"
12) Watch on You Tube the extremely important videos The Men Who Killed Kennedy, episodes 7, 8, and 9 which focus on the role of Lyndon Johnson.
13) Watch on You Tube Jesse Ventura's show on the JFK assassination.
14) Watch the movie JFK director's cut by Oliver Stone.
15) Watch on You Tube "Evidence of Revision." - 8 hours of fantastic and rare footage relating to the JFK assassination.

Another key point: Lee Harvey Oswald was U.S. intelligence and he shot NO ONE on 11/2263. Re: Oswald's intelligence connections read 1) "Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman 2) "Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and US Intelligence" by Philip Melanson 3) "History Will Not Absolve Us" by Martin Schotz (Chapter V Oswald and U.S. Intelligence by Christopher Sharrett) 4) "Me and Lee" by Judyth Vary Baker (Oswald's mistress in New Orleans, summer 1963) 5) Google "Lee Harvey Oswald's reading habits summer 1963"

If you are a good Leftist and you want to know why your ideas are not popular, this is the book for you. You don't have to worry that perhaps your ideas are wrong, or your values are not shared by the larger public. Just blame it on the media.

The main reason I do not like this book is precisely the above. It leads serious people who want to reform society into circling their wagons, talking only to each other, and ignoring the importance of speaking to the people as a whole.

The second reason I do not like this book is that I think the major argument is false, and the authors have made a poor case of marshaling the evidence for their model's being superior to other models. Indeed, they present no other models.

Here is another model: the commercial media consist of firms in competition with one another for audience. The firms that best give people what they want will succeed and the others will fail. Capitalist owners are profit-oriented and hire managers, journalists, commentators and others who maximize their firm's profits by giving people what they want. Of course, some people just want to hear stuff that confirms the political prejudices. But others base their opinions on the facts, and this part of the clientele of the media are broad enough that the observed level of delivery of factual information obtains.

Chomskey and Herman focus too much on like "macro" reasons for manufacturing consent, like governments and capitalists who want people to do things. But he doesn't focus on "micro" reasons, like check this out: one time my friend John Loggins (we call him J.Lo for short) and I were hanging out on a thursday night. J.Lo said to me, "Let's go see Spiderman 2" and I said "Nah, I want to go to Subway instead and then I want to go to bed." So he was like "No, go to Spiderman 2 with me." So I said, "I don't want to J.Lo, I'm tired and I have to get up early in the morning." Then HE says "If you don't see Spiderman 2 with me I'm not going to hang out with you anymore." Where to turn, right? So I was like "fine, we'll go see Spiderman 2." So I'm watching Spiderman 2, and it was actually pretty good. When I came out J.Lo was like "aren't you glad you went?" and I was like "Yeah I am pretty glad i went. That wasn't a bad movie" - even though I didn't even want to go see it in the first place! Ok, so how would Chomsky explain why J.Lo manufactured consent to make me go and see Spiderman 2? I saw Chomsky speak earlier this year in Vancouver, and I yelled out in the crowd for him to answer this question but he just dodged it. Dodge this book!

Manufacturing Consent is poorly researched, shoddily organized and replete with attempts to mislead and deceive the unsuspecting reader. This is not hyperbole- one can find falsehoods on nearly every page.

A typical example of the book's deceit is Chomsky and Herman's analysis of "legitimizing versus meaningless" Central American elections. They attack the fairness of the 1984 Salvadoran elections on the grounds that voting was required by law and that the government defense minister Guillermo Garcia stated abstention would be treasonous. They state that a "climate of fear" which worked to "encumber free debate and free choice... was rarely even hinted at in the mass media" (Manufacturing Consent p. 108).

They also provide a footnote (n. 69, p. 359) stating: "Warren Hoge did quote Garcia, but only to suggest an open election: 'Without any lies, you can see here what it is that the people want...' ("Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982)".

There are two problems here:

1) The Warren Hoge NYT article (the actual headline is "Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations; Rebels Close Some" - the latter part curiously omitted) cited in the footnote proves just the opposite of what Chomsky and Herman claim about the US media:

a) It explicitly mentions that "[t]he left had refused to run any candidates, arguing that they would not be safe from retaliatory violence in the current atmosphere in El Salvador."

b) It explicitly quotes a woman at a polling place who said "that people had voted out of fear that officials would threaten those whose names did not appear on the voting lists."

c) It explicitly mentions that after a guerrilla attack on a polling place, "soldiers pulled residents from their homes and beat them." Other articles from the same day mention guerrilla threats to kill those who voted ("Rural Voters, Despite Fears, Hike for Miles," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982)

And from these sources Chomsky and Herman would have the reader believe that a "climate of fear" in the Salvadoran elections was "rarely even hinted at" in the major media. Ridiculous.

2) Chomsky and Herman also do not mention Daniel Ortega giving the same treason warning as the Salvadoran defense minister to Nicaraguans in 1984: "The only ones who will not vote will be the enemies of Nicaragua, the traitors, the turncoats... and [they] will expose themselves to the fury of the people at the moment of intervention" (Robert Leiken, Why Nicaragua Vanished, p. 136), nor that this threat at a campaign rally was not cited in major press accounts (ibid. p. 135), a fact which would seem to directly contradict their propaganda model. Instead Chomsky and Herman's analysis of coercion in Nicaragua's 1984 elections descends into utter hypocrisy and absurdity: they cite a Time magazine article that says failure to vote was considered a counter-revolutionary stance, and which quotes Ortega as saying those who did not vote would be "sellouts". To this they lamely reply that Ortega's statement "was an insult but not a clear threat... not clearly a warning" (p. 124). And this rubbish is held up as penetrating analysis?

Anyone who reads this book should take the time to fact check and verify each citation, if only to see how badly they're being conned. Better yet, save your time and money and look elsewhere for scholarly and intellectually honest treatments of media bias.

Chomsky asserts a type of de facto media censorship of "radical" and otherwise critical interpretations of US foreign policy, among other topics. He's about as radical as it gets in the US. Let's see how censored Chomsky himself has been, shall we?

Strangely, there is a wide consensus in the United States regarding Chomsky's importance and influence. According to the NNDB database, Chomsky is "a profoundly influential voice". The New Statesman argues, "For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in...there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky." In addition, we all must agree with the words of Business Week, which says "With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern what they are leaving out."

Mr. Chomsky is an extremely popular lecturer around the United States, speaking on U.S. foreign policy, Mid East politics, and related subjects. He has authored more than 30 books on political subjects, and has been a political icon for three generations of the American Left. For example, The Village Voice notes "Chomsky's early books criticizing U.S. policy in southeast Asia were bibles of the Vietnam anti-war movement." His book "For Reasons of State," concerns the upheavals in domestic and international affairs of the 1970s. The New York Times Book Review noted that it "Displays those qualities which exemplify the finest traditions of intellectual responsibility." An anthology of his writings, "The Essential Chomsky" has sold more than 45,000 copies, and was lauded by The Quality Paperback Book Club.

In over 30 years of writing, Chomsky's antipathy toward the U.S. government has never wavered.

His political thought has been the subject of several serious monographs, among which are M. Rai, Chomsky's Politics (London: Verso, 1995); P. Wilkin, Noam Chomsky: On Power, Knowledge and Human Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press Inc., 1997); A. Edgley, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

He is not merely an ivory-tower intellectual, however. As the socialist website MarxMail.org has stated, "The Marxist movement can learn much from Chomsky, most of all how to speak to the ordinary citizen."

His message is spread on tapes and CDs; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a "rebel without a pause"). He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for political insight.

On the Web, there are more chat room references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10 times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle.

In short, according to The Observer, he is "the Elvis of Academia."

Uniquely among political writers, Mr. Chomsky has three books in the store.com's Top 2000.

Mr. Chomsky's book "9-11" is a best seller (it has made the best-seller lists of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice and the store.com) with over 300,000 copies sold. According to Michael Massing, the book's genesis was the huge number of interview requests made to Mr. Chomsky after the attacks of 9/11. He was unable to keep up with all the media demands on his time, and so published an anthology of interviews on the subject.

In fact, there seems to be a great demand among the heretofore slumbering American public for works critical of their government. I am happy to report that "9-11" is just one successful book, according to The Village Voice, among many that "assail the Bush administration as hypocritical, incompetent, and corrupt. Stupid White Men by Michael Moore now has 500,000 copies in print and is still number five on the New York Times Top 10." It is a very good sign that publishers see the opportunity to make money off the criticism of Bush's policies. As one publisher said, "No one wants to miss the next Stupid White Men."

Another example of this hopeful trend is "The Best Democracy money can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters," written by Greg Palast. The Village Voice quoted Palast as saying, "What I'm happy about is that with no money, no marketing, and a completely amateur operation, you can get 40,000 copies sold in the U.S.-- if you've got something to say." Palast has just sold the paperback rights to his book to American publisher Penguin Putnam for an undisclosed, but reportedly very high, amount.

In summary, Palast's story can be seen as emblematic of a new generation of American political critics. As the Village Voice puts it, "The rise of Palast's media star--he's putting his Observer column on hold to work on films and books, and will be contributing to Harper's--is coinciding with the expanding of America's appetite for unsanctioned perspectives."

Chomsky's "9-11" has been more successful than these other two books, however, perhaps because of his higher profile and more intense media coverage of his work in general. (Chomsky's publisher keeps its eyes on the bottom line: even the small pamphlet "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" has sold over 160,000 copies.) Mr. Chomsky's publisher took out front-page ads in national newspapers and magazines, and, according to The Village Voice, the book "received prominent placement in bookstores upon its release." In light of its controversial claims,

"...the mainstream media came calling on the
iconoclastic Chomsky. After profiles ran in The New York
Times and The Washington Post in May 2002, he faced off with
arch-conservative Bill Bennett on CNN's American Morning
With Paula Zahn, an appearance that created a definite spike
in sales, according to Greg Ruggiero, Chomsky's editor."

Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent," published in 1988, was also wildly popular. The book bravely identifies the fact that "America's government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear." The book was reviewed very favorably in the New York Times, which called it "[A] compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions in American foreign policy of the past quarter century."

Four of his books have been made into films, among which "Manufacturing Consent" has been called (by Inroads magazine) "among the most viewed documentaries of all time."

Chomsky is among the American media's 100 most-cited intellectuals, according to Inroads Magazine. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is "the most often cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." In fact, an entire network of left-wing media - Z Magazine, Pacifica Radio, South End Press - repeat virtually his every word.

He is a winner of the Orwell Award for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language." (Ted Koppel of ABC News is another distinguished recipient.)

Mr. Chomsky's main thesis, in all his political works, is that the American media filters out points of view that are critical of the United States government. Somehow, the media filter can't seem to pick up his own radical publications. Not much of a filter, eh?

PROPAGANDA
Many credit Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" with being the premier study of government propaganda. In Leftist circles it is hailed as a Bible, a rite of passage for any true activist to understand the system. But again, Chomsky's work, while appearing radical, is actually gatekeeper disinfo.

Chomsky spends the entire book attempting to prove that newspapers diminish American war crimes while exaggerating those of foreign governments. Such a point is easy to prove, and he does so in his own droll and methodical method.

Yet he stops there. Chomsky does not discuss the real elephant in the room: direct CIA collaboration with media outlets and journalists beginning in the 1950's under Operation Mockingbird.

Chomsky avoids writing about Mockingbird, the CIA program which covertly put major publishing, newspaper, and media outlets, as well as thousands of individual reporters under direct agency control. Agents included Ben Bradlee at Newsweek, Henry Luce of Time and Life, and Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times, Alfred Friendly of the Washington Post, and Joseph Harrison Christian Science Monitor.

Shouldn't this a significant development for a historian authoring an honest study of propaganda? After all who is to say that this program doesn't still continue? The Bush administration has admitted spending hundreds of millions on fake newscasts and paying individual reporters like Armstrong Williams to push talking points in newspapers. What about the times they haven't been caught? Exactly how many mainstream commentary and news outlets work with the CIA and White House?

Perhaps this is the reason why the scripts of the nightly news on ABC, CBS, and NBC are almost exactly the same, while Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times push the elitist agenda on cue (as seen most prominently in the run up to the war in Iraq).

Furthermore Chomsky does not discuss collaboration between the Bilderberg Committee and the major media outlets. Shouldn't this concern the so-called radical anarchist, when media editors attend secret meetings calling for eugenics, world government, and a cashless society control grid?

Owners, editors and writers from Time, Newsweek, Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC and every news outlet in between have attended the world government meetings.

Furthermore, what about the influence of the CFR, which openly calls for a Panamerican Union and the end of American national sovereignty? The CFR counts amongst its members major editors, owners, and journalists in media outlets from PBS to CBS, CNN to News Corp., New Republic to U.S. News and World Report.

Aren't these the reasons that journalists push the propaganda Chomsky identifies? In "Manufacturing Consent," Chomsky takes limited aim at an easy target. But he fails to dig deeper and examine the actual reasons why the propaganda permeates the mainstream media opinion. Clearly the influence of the CIA, CFR, Bilderberg Committee, and White House have turned major media outlets into little more than docile commissars. Furthermore, the interlocking interests of media owners with the military industrial complex have served to sway content even further.

Chomsky's "classic" study is little more than a limited hangout project. He is merely shooting the messengers, blaming journalistic "bias" while failing to follow the trail of money, power, corruption, and black propaganda. Instead, he identifies some passive propaganda and is hailed as a brilliant analyst and purveyor of truth by the Leftist minions. But his true achievement is ignoring the reasons behind the lies, as he executes a masterful bait and switch tactic. Is it a coincidence that Chomsky's co-author for "Manufacturing Consent," Edward Herman, has also denied any government complicity in 9-11?

While claiming to expose propaganda, Chomsky has perfected the art.

This book was a mandatory read for my propaganda class at UCLA. If colleges didn't force people to read this smut, his book would be even lower than his 1800 on the store.com. Noam Chomsky's whole argument is based on cause correlation which is an inherently flawed way to measure the media's reporting. Chomsky believes that when one event occurs it is directly related to another. Anybody who understands how to do research knows that you can't rely on this method to make valid conclusions. To make up for this discrepancy, Chomsky repeats himself a thousand times throughout the book. This book gets my lowest score. I highly recommend Anne Coulter's book Slander which does a much better job of explaining biases in the media. She presents facts explaining how the media is liberal, not conservative.

In my scientific understanding I have noticed that the "popular" books of Noam Chomsky usually have very impressive titles BUT they usually describe useless Details,Details and MISSING THE ESSENTIALS & THE PRINCIPLES & THE ASSUMPTIONS & THE BOUNDARY CONDITIONS OF THE THEME(S) , therefore I rather consider Noam Chosky "popular" book(s) as MISIINFORMATION for those Who Want REASONING + REAL UNDERSTANDING...
From Joseph-Christos Kondylakis , 7-June-2014

Noam Chomsky is CIA's favorite fake lefty.
He is in fact an agent of the right wing.
Why are so many fooled by him?

-He denies US government involvement in 911:
[...]

-He wrote "Rethinking Camelot: Jfk, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture"
in which he lies about President Kennedy's record and smears him as a hawk.
Absolute lies.

Read "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" for the facts.

Kennedy was, by his own words, "a peace at any price president." With Vietnam. With Cuba. With Russia. Over and over he proved it. Listen to his masterpiece speech at American University (aka the nail in his coffin):
[...]

Chomsky props up official government lies on the most significant events in US history because he is an agent of the right masquerading as a dissident to confuse actual dissidents.

Wake up and understand who controls the media and who they vote for. Why would these Dem voting owners and employees possibly push a Republican Agenda? Can you possibly answer that?

What about Dan Rather trying to subvert an upcoming election with false reporting prior to an election and yet he was supported by his media outlet until the whithering fire from other outlets forced him to admit the story was false.