Manufacturing consent The political economy of the mass media

Review by Booklist Review

This study of governmental use of propaganda in the mass media as a force in engineering democratic consent by management of public opinion may look like a bit of media bashing from the Left, despite the authors' claims to the contrary. In reality, however, the book's intent is even more ambitious as links are portrayed between government decisions and the special interests that will benefit economically and politically from these actions. The authors first set up a propaganda model and show how the press operates as part of this establishment. For most readers, the real meat of the text will be the application of this theoretical model to the national media's actual reports and coverage of any number of topical issues: terrorism, U.S. policy in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. While the argument remains ideologically charged, the exposure of slanted, uneven, and biased coverage certainly deserves further attention, as does the whole concept of freedom of the press. Notes, appendixes; to be indexed. JB.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America's government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandisticthe major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media's close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events. For example, the authors maintain that ``it would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland.'' Such allegations would be routine were it not for the excellent research behind this book's controversial charges. Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedoms is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interests of America's privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake. First serial to the Progressive. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

More heavy-handed analysis by the baron of linguistics, Chomsky (Rules and Representations, 1980, among others), and Herman (Finance/Wharton School). The subject is the actual effect of the mass media on public opinion and just what it is that the media attempt to accomplish. As the title suggests, the authors aim to demonstrate that the media in America tend to buttress elite groups and privileged organizations. Those who argue that the media are too aggressive, obstinate, or cantankerous in their public persecutions of selected government leaders or policies are wrong, the authors state. Rather, the media always serve a ""societal purpose""--which is ""not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary. . .the 'societal purpose'. . .is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups. . ."" How do the media accomplish this? Via ""selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis, and tone."" This argument is not original; other books have argued (in much clearer prose) basically the same idea (e.g., The Media Elite, by Robert S. Lichter, 1986). And what further weakens this book are the strained examples that the authors choose: that media excesses in the Watergate scandal and in advocating an anti-Vietnam stance, for instance, were not cases of adversarial journalism, but of journalism coming to the defense of a weakened Congress (itself a prime example of a privileged group). Stretching for its thesis, and as a result not strongly argued. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction   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 which they operate. 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 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 newsworthiness that conform to the institutions policy.   Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media's treatment of news (that is, produce "flak"), to provide "experts" to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population. In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serves 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.   These structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results. It is well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of and institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organization have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. These considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts. The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.   It should also be noted that we are talking about media structure and performance, not the effects of the media on the public. Certainly, the media's adherence to an official agenda with little dissent is likely to influence public opinion in the desired direction, but this is a matter of degree, and where the public's interests diverge sharply from that of the elite, and where they have their own independent sources of information, the official line may be widely doubted. The point that we want to stress here, however, is that the propaganda model describes forces that shape what the media does; it does not imply that any propaganda emanating from the media is always effective.   Although now more than a dozen years old, both the propaganda model and the case studies presented with it in the first edition of this book have held up remarkably well. The purpose of this new Introduction is to update the model, add some materials to supplement the case studies already in place (and left intact in the chapters to follow), and finally, to point out the possible applicability of the model to a number of issue under current or recent debate. Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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