Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Edward S. Herman · Noam Chomsky

Jul 2011 · Sold by Pantheon

About this ebook

A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction.

In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show 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.

Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance.

Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Ratings and reviews

Herman and Chomsky construct a powerful argument that the US mass media (at least, in the 60's-80's) - through the filters of corporate ownership, advertising, limited sourcing of information, and flak from corporate interest groups - function as a mostly self-regulating system of corporate and government propoganda. They argue that the media filter world events and US foreign wars through an ideological lens, helping to conceal and prolong mass murder in US client states, focusing only on human rights violations in states whose government the US opposes. The first few sections - comparing media apologetics for state terror in Guatemala and El Salvador to coverage of Nicaragua - and covering a media-fabricated KGB plot to kill the pope - are excellent. The chapters on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - while also excellent, are more qualitative. My only criticism is that the thread from corporate / government interests to disinformation is usually, but not always, clear.

Extreme socialists subjectively criticizing and pressuring freedom of the press and the dwindling press media to push an authoritarian agenda. Socialism promotes extreme poverty, especially intellectual poverty. Diversity, individuality, freedom and responsibility are non-negotiable ever.

About the author

EDWARD S. HERMAN is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

NOAM CHOMSKY is Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.