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Title: Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman ISBN: 0-375-71449-9 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 15 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (55 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Introduction into American Politics
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: How the US media really works
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: W/ Bible & A. Miller, this should be in every American home
Comment: "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.
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Title: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 1583225366 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present by Howard Zinn ISBN: 0060528370 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: 9-11 by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 1583224890 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0805074007 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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