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Manufacturing Consent

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Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Cover of the first edition
Authors
LanguageEnglish
SubjectMedia of the United States
PublisherPantheon Books
Publication date1988
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover, Paperback)
ISBN0-375-71449-9
OCLC47971712
Dewey Decimal381/.4530223 21
LC ClassP96.E25 H47 2002
Preceded byThe Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians 
Followed byNecessary Illusions 

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent," employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).

The book was first published in 1988 and was revised 20 years later to take account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. There has been debate about how the internet has changed the public´s access to information since 1988.

Origins of the book

Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom he and co-author E. S. Herman dedicated the book.

Authorship

According to Chomsky, "most of the book" was Herman's work. Herman describes a rough division of labor in preparing the book whereby he was responsible for the preface and chapters 1-4 while Chomsky was responsible for chapters 5-7. According to Herman, the propaganda model described in the book was originally his idea, tracing it back to his 1981 book Corporate Control, Corporate Power.

Film adaptation

Four years after publication, Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media was adapted to the cinema as Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), a documentary presentation of the propaganda-model of communication, the politics of the mass-communications business, and a biography of Chomsky.

Propaganda model of communication

Main article: Propaganda model

Five filters of editorial bias

The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media:

  1. Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large companies operated for profit, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners, who are usually corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
  2. The Advertising License to Do Business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority". Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
  3. Sourcing Mass Media News: Herman and Chomsky argue that “the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access , by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.”
  4. Flak and the Enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.
  5. Anti-Communism: This was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "War on Terror" as the major social control mechanism.

Case studies of the propaganda model in action

Worthy and unworthy victims

A chapter of Manufacturing Consent was devoted to a concept previously mentioned in The Political Economy of Human Rights, of the idea of worthy and unworthy victims. The chapter consisted of a comparison of media attention given to the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popiełuszko by the Polish secret police as compared to media attention provided to the murders of 100 church workers in Latin American client states of the United States, including the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero and four American women, who were raped and murdered by members of the El Salvadoran National Guard. Herman and Chomsky argued that since Popiełuszko was murdered by a client state of the Soviet Union, he was a worthy victim, and the victims of American client regimes were unworthy victims. Herman and Chomsky’s analysis found that Popieluszko’s murder received far more American media coverage than the collective coverage of 100 murdered Latin American church workers. Also, Herman and Chomsky argued that worthy victims received sympathetic coverage, while unworthy victims don’t, such as media reporting of false statements made by high-ranking American officials that those raped and murdered American women deserved their fate.

Legitimizing versus meaningless Third World elections

A chapter of Manufacturing Consent was devoted to a concept that Herman wrote a book about, with Frank Brodhead in 1984 (Demonstration Elections), on media coverage of elections that the American government staged or promoted in client regimes. The chapter contrasted the American media’s treatment of elections in American client states Guatemala and El Salvador with elections run in revolutionary Nicaragua, which the American government was trying to overthrow with its proxy army called the Contras.

Herman and Chomsky presented evidence that the elections in Guatemala and El Salvador were largely fraudulent, with opposition candidates and journalists routinely murdered, while Nicaragua’s election was relatively impartial, even while Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime was under constant attack from the United States and its proxies. Herman and Chomsky analyzed the media’s treatment of those elections, as it described the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran elections as free, fair, and a model of democracy in action, while portraying the Nicaraguan election as a sham.

The KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the pope

A chapter of Manufacturing Consent was devoted to an event that Herman wrote a book about, with Frank Brodhead in 1986 (The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection), on American media coverage of the trial of Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981. The media falsely implicated Bulgaria and the Soviet Union as being behind the assassination attempt. The entire case of Bulgarian and Soviet involvement was based on statements that the obviously mentally ill Ağca (who declared that he was Jesus Christ while in the courtroom) made while under interrogation by the Italian police. Herman and Chomsky wrote that the American media prominently covered Ağca’s trial while the Soviet connection was in play, but quietly dropped the matter when the defendants in the “conspiracy” were all acquitted for a lack of evidence.

The Indochina wars

Two chapters of Manufacturing Consent were devoted to the Indochina Wars, and comprised Chomsky’s primary contribution to Manufacturing Consent. The chapters dealt with the American media’s treatment of the Indochina wars and repeated themes in Chomsky and Herman’s The Political Economy of Human Rights. The primary argument in both works was how the American media always framed the Indochinese wars as a noble cause gone awry, not an aggressive imperial crime. Herman and Chomsky wrote that that idea the United States had committed a crime was “unthinkable” in the American media.

Reception

Manufacturing Consent won the 1989 Orwell Award.

Historian Walter LaFeber, in his review of the original 1988 edition for The New York Times, thought "their argument is sometimes weakened by overstatement" citing Herman and Chomsky's attack on major American news sources for reproducing false government assertions about Nicaragua but failing to note that those same sources quickly attacked the government when the deliberate error was discovered. Derek N. Shearer, also in 1988 for the Los Angeles Times, described the work as "important" and the "case studies" as "required reading" for foreign correspondents but in his view the author's "don't adequately explore the extent to which the mass media fail to manufacture consent, and why this might be so". To suggest the validity of his point, Shearer uses the examples of the Contras in Nicaragua and the deposed Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, both supported by the US government and conservatives but not by American public opinion. Shearer also commented that they "persuasively demonstrate that in countries where the American government is involved—either openly or covertly—the press is frequently less than critical, and sometimes a partner in outright deception of the American public."

"The whole approach of the book is deeply simplistic" according to Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia University. "If you think that The New York Times is Pravda, which is essentially what they’re saying, then what vocabulary do you have left for Fox News? Their model is so clumsy that it disables you from distinguishing between a straight-out propaganda network and a more complex, hegemonic mainstream news organ".

Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone: “Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda. Herman and Chomsky's work was a great gift to a generation of thinkers trying to make sense of how power in the West sold itself to populations.”

2002 edition

In 2002, a second edition of Manufacturing Consent was published, with a new introduction that updated the propaganda model and the case studies, as well as presenting further applications of the propaganda model, such as debates on military spending and the media’s coverage of neoliberal efforts led by the WTO, World Bank, and IMF. An example was the media’s hostile coverage of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, while it failed to mention the particulars of what was being protested.

The new introduction, in a prelude to Herman and David Peterson’s The Politics of Genocide, presented a table of the mainstream media’s use of the term “genocide,” in which deaths in Kosovo were called genocide 220 times versus 33 times for East Timor, the United States-led Iraq sanctions were called genocide 18 times, and the table presented the disparity between the disparity of the use of genocide to describe the treatment of Iraq’s Kurds (132 times) versus Turkey’s Kurds (14 times).

Further developments

  • In 1993, the documentary film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, partly based upon the book, presents the propaganda model and its arguments, and a biography of Chomsky.
  • In 2006, the Turkish government prosecuted Fatih Tas, owner of the Aram editorial house, two editors and the translator of the revised (2002) edition of Manufacturing Consent for "stirring hatred among the public" (per Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code) and for "denigrating the national identity" of Turkey (per Article 301), because that edition’s introduction addresses the Turkish news media’s reportage of governmental suppression of the Kurdish populace in the 1990s; they were acquitted.
  • In 2007, at the 20 Years of Propaganda?: Critical Discussions & Evidence on the Ongoing Relevance of the Herman & Chomsky Propaganda Model (15–17 May 2007) conference at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Herman and Chomsky summarized developments to the propaganda model on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of publication of Manufacturing Consent.
  • In 2008, Chomsky replied to questions concerning the ways internet blogs and self-generated news reportage conform to and differ from the propaganda model. He also explained how access to information is not enough, because a framework of understanding is required.

See also

References

  1. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 306.
  2. p. xi, Manufacturing Consent. Also, p. 13, Noam Chomsky, Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda, Paradigm Publishers 2004.
  3. Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare, Pluto Press 1996, p. 29: "Ed Herman and I dedicated our book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. He had just died. It was not intended as just a symbolic gesture. He got both of us started in a lot of this work."
  4. p. 8, Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995.
  5. p. 204, Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar.
  6. p. 205, Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar.
  7. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility : the press and broadcasting in Britain (First edition 1981, with many subsequent editions).
  8. ^ Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.
  9. Noam Chomsky, Media Control, the Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (1997).
  10. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 37–86.
  11. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 60.
  12. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 87–142.
  13. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 143–167.
  14. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 169–296.
  15. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 252.
  16. LeFeber, Walter (November 6, 1988). "Whose News?". The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2017. Herman responded to LaFeber's article, see Herman, Edward S.; LaFeber, Walter (December 11, 1988). "News and Propaganda". The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  17. ^ Shearer, Derek N. (November 13, 1988). "Citizens or Sheep". Los Angeles Times.
  18. Smith, Harrison (16 November 2017). "Edward S. Herman, media critic who co-wrote Manufacturing Consent, dies at 92". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 November 2017.
  19. Taibbi, Matt (November 14, 2017). "RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That's Now More Important Than Ever: We need a new Manufacturing Consent". Rolling Stone. Retrieved July 4, 2018.
  20. Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam (2002). Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books. p. xliii. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  21. Butler, Daren (2006-07-04). "Turkish publisher faces prosecution over Chomsky book". Reuters. Retrieved 2006-07-12.
  22. "Turks acquitted over Chomsky book". London: BBC News. 2006-12-20. Retrieved 2006-12-20.
  23. Paul D. Boin (2007) Herman & Chomsky Media Conference notice from University of Windsor
  24. "Authors@Google: Noam Chomsky". 2008-05-02.

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