MANUFACTURING CONSENT – Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

WHY READ IT?

Remember that scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon name drops A People’s History of the United States saying it’s a book that will “knock you on your ass”?  In that scene, Robin William’s character counters with Manufacturing Consent, a book that describes itself as a “political economy of the mass media.”  This book describes how the news media creates and distributes propaganda narratives to the public.  Hermann and Chomsky lay out how the media can act independent of government control, but still serve to distort reality in favor of governmental, corporate and elite interests.  This isn’t always conscious, but is the result of built-in biases, the need for advertising revenue, access to sources and other incentives.  It was written in the 1980s, so it doesn’t incorporate the internet or social media age, but its lessons endure.

Mass Media in contemporary American life is impossible to avoid.   An endless array of websites, social media, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, and video games assault your senses. They all clamor for your attention.  During my parents’ childhood, there were a half dozen channels on their TV screen, some radio stations, a daily newspaper and the local library. That’s about it. There’s no comparison to what we have available now.

Instead of a couple dozen sources of media that could hit you on an average day, now there’s hundreds.  Thousands, even.  The clearest consequence of this is that Americans now have no hope of having a common referent for things like major news events.  To be fair, there’s rarely been a moment where all Americans were all tuned to the same channel.  But any given media source once had a better chance at dominating the conversation and influencing people’s perception of events.  For better or for worse (and there’s reasons to check the box in the “better” and “worse” columns there), that time is gone.  It isn’t coming back.

Nowadays, most people don’t think of news sites or television stations as performing a “public service” or acting in a position of “public trust”. We all pretty much know these news outlets are owned by larger corporations, and are run to make a profit.  They bombard us with ads. As such, we suspect the motivations behind their coverage are influenced by their advertisers. How could they not be?  Many believe (with good reason) that news sources are in bed with major political parties or powerful elites. We think they’re working in the end to serve their interests or the interests of the United States government, both here and abroad.

Manufacturing Consent remains the most popular and influential work describing how this all works to shape our perceptions.  It’s been praised and taken to heart by many, and had holes poked in it by others.  But much like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, it can’t be ignored.

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

“[T]he Media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” 

They don’t do it with heavy-handed censorship that you might imagine in the classic image of an authoritarian state.  Instead, they make sure that news outlets are staffed and run by journalists, editors and executives that will conform to the views that elites and elite institutions require.  By elite, I’m speaking broadly – rich corporate leaders, government officials, ranking bureaucrats, major political donors, cultural power-brokers.

All of them can get involved in guiding media narratives in the direction they desire. They do this by providing funding, having ownership over the news outlet and/or its parent company, or by leveraging relationships.  The authors claim that the folks you see criticizing the media – a practice they call flak – and those providing expert analysis, are constrained and directed by these same interests.

At first I thought this was a pretty bold thesis to put out. It seems like you’d want plenty of examples to demonstrate that it’s happening.  The back end of the book illustrates that elite control and self-censorship by using examples of news stories from the 1970s and 1980s.  But in another way, this seems to be conventional wisdom at this point.  For every person who thinks CNN is elite, manufactured nonsense and Fox News is true, or vice versa, I seem to find two people who know for certain they’re both selling you the same poison. One of them’s shoveling red poison down your throat while the other’s waiting with a feed trough full of blue.

Elites with media influence are able to influence or censure media outlets that are free in theory. They coax them to create propaganda to further policies and interests favoring those same elites.  In doing so, they manufacture consent among the citizens of our country for the policies they want followed.

WHAT CHANGED THAT MADE THIS BOOK NECESSARY?

The biggest culprit has to be the increased corporatization of American media.  Small town papers, news stations, radio stations, startups and more are getting bought up all the time by larger and larger companies. Many of them only have a minor interest in the news itself or being a “media company”.  Their emphasis tends to be turning a profit. They use the news to push advertising or brand synergy and cross-promotion with their other products.  They prioritize ratings, sales, listeners and page-clicks. This is more important than whether a news item merits public scrutiny or attention.   As a result, the sources of media once devoted to our national problems and challenges – what we call the “public forums” – have been hijacked by a commercial culture.   This is the argument Herman and Chomsky make. I might be a little more skeptical that the media ever had a golden age that good. Maybe they are too, but they’re trying to be optimistic.

When a country’s collection of media outlets is private instead of public, it is harder to see censorship at work.  In America, we see plenty of media criticism of the government, regardless of which party is in power.  We see reporting of the misdeeds of large corporations, whether they are financial criminals, polluters, or killing people.  We see the media discussing themselves as a bastion of democracy. They claim a “fifth estate” that is necessary to a free society, and a champion for free speech and the common good.  In fact, plenty in the media see themselves that way. They believe they are independent, and are not broadcasting or publishing what amounts to propaganda.  They often believe what they’re selling.

The censorship regime Herman and Chomsky are talking about doesn’t mean that reporters don’t see themselves as honest. Many try to be objective, and to do their jobs for the benefit of the people.  The constraints, biases, and what Chomsky and Herman call filters, all operate on a level underneath this. They change the news media’s calculus about what to report and how.

FILTERS OF THE PROPAGANDA MODEL:

Chomsky and Herman lay out five filters that combine to influence and constrain mass media sources. This is how the system creates propaganda.  I’ll lay them out here, and explain what value they have.  But please note: Manufacturing Consent is over thirty years old at this point. It focuses on media sources like newspapers and television that are less relevant nowadays. Along the same lines, the examples Chomsky and Herman cite to show how their model works are pretty dated, as well.  We’ll see if we can come up with more relevant ones.

SIZE, OWNERSHIP, WEALTH, AND PROFIT-SEEKING

Consider the following: most media outlets in the United States, from your favorite radio and local TV station to your city’s newspaper, are owned by only five or six corporations.  Who are we talking about?

• COMCAST – this includes everything from NBC, Universal, Telemundo, E!, and dozens of local stations

• DISNEY – ABC and its news outlets, Star Wars, Marvel, A+E, ESPN, dozens of local stations

• AT&T – Warner Bros, New Line Cinema, the CW, DC Films, Cartoon Network, HBO, TBS & TNT

• ViacomCBS – Paramount Pictures, CBS, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Star Trek

• SONY – Sony Music Group, Sony Pictures, Playstation

• NewsCorp & Fox – now two companies both controlled by the Murdoch family. Their holdings include the Fox Network, Fox News, HarperCollins Publishing, The Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, Fox Sports and more

As the news sources we have are swallowed up by ever-larger conglomerates, it gets more and more expensive to compete against them.  An upstart newspaper, Youtube Channel or website has limited resources – but Disney?  AT&T?  Theirs are infinite by comparison, inexhaustible.  If they’re determined to grind a tiny media outlet into dust, they can and likely will do it.

The US government has helped along this process of media companies getting bought out, like fish getting swallowed by bigger and bigger fish.  Deregulation has relaxed or eliminated rules about how many media outlets one company can buy. Megacorps are taking advantage of this.  If you’re a millennial like me, you can’t remember a time where news media was obligated to present multiple sides –  or in our screwed up two-party hegemony, “both sides” – of an argument, but that time did exist.  The fairness doctrine that made it possible was repealed decades ago. It left these media megacorps no reason to look out for the public interest.  What did they do with all their new free time and resources?  They sought to maximize profits. Every news division became seen as either another profit generator or as an expensive drain on a company’s resources. That drives a company to try to cater to their advertisers, investors and the allure of ratings over what’s newsworthy or important to the public.

ADVERTISING

A news source that offers advertising, like a newspaper, is able to offer that at a much cheaper rate. They don’t have to recoup the entire cost of printing the paper, paying employees, and making a tiny profit off of the purchase price of the paper alone. That cost is subsidized by the advertisements.  This also means that an advertising paper will tend to drive a sales-only paper out of the market. The advertising paper will be able to do what they do while spending way less money and be cheaper for the consumer themselves.  In other words, survival for one of these new sources depends on keeping the advertisers happy enough to participate.  In the long run this kills papers, especially small-time or radical papers, because advertisers are way less interested in working with them.  Since I write about “dangerous” and “radical” books and ideas on a regular basis on this free website, that’s likely to keep me up at night.  Pity people trying to accomplish honest journalism in the face of this market. The richer the audience you acquire, the better. By that, I mean the more affluent a reader is, the more valuable they are to an advertiser. It’s not always about how many people are reading a newspaper or watching a news channel, but which people, and how much is in their pockets. Working class media outlets and leftist ones tend to be opposed by advertisers because the views of these publications work against an advertiser’s interests.  Over time, all these outlets learn to write what keeps the advertisers happy and what will bring in more affluent audience members. They do this instead of focusing on what is newsworthy or what needs to be reported.  The need for revenue drives the content more, in the end, than any other factor.

SOURCING

24-hour news is still a recent invention in the history of mass media.  It used to be a media company might have to prepare for a daily paper or a few daily broadcasts, but that was the extent of it.  With the advent of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News both on cable and on social media, the game changed.  Such organizations need more content at a much faster clip than they might have in the past. Yet they do not have the capacity to investigate everything they hear or need to report.

What’s a poor media conglomerate to do?  Rely on official sources such as press releases, liasons, and spokesmen. Then fire expensive investigative reporters.  Do this and you will have the story half-written or produced for you, and that keeps you in the 24-hour game.  If you rely on these sources, however, you’ll be dependent on them. This creates a bias toward the statements officials and PR firms put out for the press to consume.  The influence that institutions get by doing this can convince media outlets to carry dubious stories. They may hold off on criticism, or treat the institutions more favorably in the reporting that they do publish.  This filter extends to experts that are known to toe the official line when they’re interviewed or put on panels.  This create the illusion that false or misleading views are legitimate. After all, the “official source” is also providing this perspective.

FLAK

“Flak” is any negative criticism to a news story, program, what have you.  It can be protests, petitions, letters, bills, or even competing programming. As long as it criticizes, complaints, or threatens that media source, it may qualify.  There are “media watchdogs” and issue-based groups who spend a lot of their time creating flak against media outlets. Once a parent corporation realizes that a media outlet can get this kind of criticism, they think twice about airing unpopular views.  This one is pretty easy to understand. How many of us have jobs where we spend a large portion of our day doing something only because doing it that way will keep us from getting yelled at? Manufacturing Consent was written before internet use became widespread. This was before social media became the leading way we interact with our news sources.  That change has made flak even easier to send and harder to ignore.  It takes a lot less effort to comment on a Facebook post or retweet something than it does to stage a protest or write a letter to the editor.  You might not see the protest on the news, and a media outlet can ignore a letter to the point where it doesn’t exist. Yet it’d be easy to log on right now and see countless examples of how social media makes flak more visible.

ANTI-COMMUNISM!

In the late 1980s, when this book was written, the prospect of communism was way, way less popular in the US than socialism is now.  In 2021, we might do better to amend this to read “anti-socialism”, since that is the terminology that was more often invoked in America as of 2021. The idea that socialism or communism is on the horizon makes any alternative to it seem better for Americans. Many of us are still taught that these ideologies spell destruction to our way of life.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2020 that 40% of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. Those numbers are even higher among young people.  People will argue, with some good reason, that a lot of the policies Americans see as “socialist” aren’t socialist at all. They’re the sort of policies you’ll see in any capitalist nation in Europe that still has a strong “social welfare state”.  Still, the polling and the discourse suggests that close to half the country sees capitalism as fatally flawed. They are looking for alternatives to it.

The anti-socialist rhetoric you see on places like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, the Wall Street Journal, and so on pushes back against this sentiment. They don’t stop at condemning the actual left, either. Rather, the attack extends to liberals, centrists, even moderates. They all get painted as acting in the ultimate interest of Communism/Socialism/Satan himself and his good friend Pol Pot.  Anything less than a hard right line is tantamount to aiding and abetting the enemy.

THE OVERTON WINDOW

The Overton Window is a term political scientists use to describe the acceptable range of political ideas.  Think of politics, however simplistically, as a spectrum on a line for a moment.  On the far right, you have ideologies like fascism.  On the far left, communism and anarchism.  Many countries have political parties ranging from communists on the left to fascists on the right.  In some of them, many different parties hold some amount of formal power, through seats in parliaments or somewhere else in government.  In the US, almost all political power is held by two parties – the Republican and Democratic parties.  While they fight by calling each other fascists or communists, respectively, there was until recently very few in either camp who actually went to those extremes.  Instead, there was consensus on the largest issues. The GOP and Dems agreed on the structure of the constitutional system itself and the nature of private property. They both supported a strong military, opposed communism, and supported business interests.  While both sides called out each other at one time or another for betraying this consensus. Yet non-polarized observers of history will see that in the end, both parties more or less held to this common set of priorities. They just did a little tinkering around the edges.

The Overton Window of acceptable ideas is really, really narrow in the United States. The GOP has been trending more rightward for many decades, essentially since Nixon and his Southern Strategy, although the rightward tilt really kicked into high gear around the 1994 Midterm elections. This happened again during the Tea Party Movement and again with MAGA.  Trump’s tilt toward fascism is the latest progression of a long trend, not an anomaly.  Meanwhile, the Democrats had been moving away from the left with 1992’s election of Bill Clinton. They only started to move firmly back in the opposite direction after the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests sparked the flame. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president made it into a brush-fire.  Yet Bernie’s “democratic socialist” policies can be found in the capitalist social democracies of Europe. Most genuine socialist parties would consider most of them pretty right-wing.

These five filters that Chomsky and Herman discuss work in tandem, in one combination or another. They keep alternative, radical, or leftist views out of the mainstream.  They also work to outright suppress new stories that business and governmental elites don’t want heard. In world news, it has the effect of treating pro-American or American-led actions in a positive light. These same actions would be treated as distasteful, violent, or criminal when committed by an enemy of the United States or an opponent.

AROUND THE WORLD

I generally found the second part of the bookless useful than the first one. It presents several case studies of international news stories from the 20th century that can be used to examine the five filters at work.  Most of the examples are valid, but dated in their historical context. They show a media landscape we’d have a little trouble recognizing in 2021.  They cover, among others:

• The assassination of dissident Polish Catholic priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984, seen as a widely publicized tragedy by Western media and a “worthy victim” of communism;

• The assassination of dissident Salvadoran Catholic Priest Oscar Romero in 1980 by right-wing militia members, which received less coverage in the US, and for which the coverage that did exist used passive language and relied on official sources;

• The murder of American churchwomen by Salvadoran National Guards in 1980 seen as “unworthy victims” because the US had an interest in keeping good relations with the Salvadoran government and was providing them military aid against leftist Sandinista rebels;

• Elections in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. fChomsky and Herman allege US coverage was biased in favor of congratulating right wing governments despite evidence of widespread corruption and blasting left wing governments as illegitimate despite similar faults, or through ignoring the protections and safeguards that gave those elections extra legitimacy;

• The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1982, where a KGB plot was rumored to be the cause;

• The American wars against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

These examples were often powerful, and did do a solid job of illuminating Chomsky and Herman’s central points.  Chomsky wrote most, if not all, of these later chapters rather than Herman.  But this is, in the end, reinforcement of a model that is already established earlier in the book.  And if you’re a consumer of news media, you might have started to realize you’ve seen more recent examples of this process already.  Some of the description of events, and corresponding dishonest media coverage of it, gets repetitive after a while. I know that’s a horrible thing to admit given some of the brutality and injustice embodied in these examples.  I recommend reading them if they seem helpful. I’m also hoping to create more up-to-date examples of how consent is manufactured in our media, or find them and link them here on PROLE ACADEMY.

BOTTOM LINE

We need a free press, there’s no question of it for me.  It’s crucial.  No one person can gather all the info they need to be an informed political and economic actor alone. Nothing in this book can dissuade me from that, nor does the book try.  And yet, this propaganda model suggests that America news media is serving and popularizing the agenda of elites in our society.  Even “liberal” media falls victim to this, as they are no more immune than any other source.  Sorry, Pod Save America.  Apologies, Rachel Maddow.  They’re still subject to, and agents of, the propaganda model. This is the case even when they’re opposing “conservative” administrations.  As an example, Chomsky and Herman cite the press criticism of the US invasion of Cambodia.  The press did condemn it, but most criticism was due to the fact that the administration had invaded without securing an okay from Congress.  Hardly any of the flak in other major media sources condemned the invasion itself as morally wrong.  The idea that it was proper and just to fight communism in Cambodia because it was communism and thus constituted a threat to US interests?  That never seriously got questioned.

And it’s probably important to stress, that as bad as the American media system is, there are many places where it’s worse.  Dissent is permitted in this country.  Dissident news sources publish with a freedom that would make others envious.  Chomsky and Herman note “they permit – indeed, 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.”  There’s that Overton Window again. Within that window, you can debate for 24 hours a day on cable news, or on social media.  But reach outside that Overton Window and you might feel the pressure of big media conglomerates, advertisers, or flak from critics. You might even get branded as an un-American socialist radical for your trouble.

This propaganda model of Chomsky and Herman’s is pretty clear, even though it could use some updating in light of the last thirty years.  I’m told that there’s an updated version from what I read, and perhaps that covers some of the distance.  In either case, this helps us understand why and how the media adapts to elite pressures and corporate influence.  And to their credit, many journalists are aware this is how it works, and look for every opening they can to get something past these filters.  While online news sources and social media can reinforce and serve these filters, and the elites that benefit from their use, it can also work against their wishes.  The right story or opinion, at the right time and place, can still shock people into a greater consciousness. Brave reporters can confound expectations and change the conversation.  A lot of those people end up writing books, and I hope to read and review a lot of their work on PROLE ACADEMY in months to come.