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Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of
the Mass Media
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Published by Pantheon Books, New York, 2002
Pp. 329
`MANUFACTURING CONSENT' is a powerful
assessment of how the US mass media fail to provide the kind of
information that we need to understand the world.
The book is an analytical framework that attempts to explain the
performance of the US media in terms of the basic institutional
structures and relationships within which they operate.
It is based on a series of case studies including the media treatment
of worthy versus unworthy victims, legitimising and meaningless Third
World elections and devastating critiques of media coverage of the US
wars against Indochina, in additional to other issues related to media
propaganda.
The book is divided into seven chapters throughout which the writers
draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a propaganda
model to explain the media's behaviour and performance.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky show that the mainstream media have
followed a government agenda in treating elections in client and
disfavoured states.
They examine, in the chapter titled `The Third World Elections', the
differences in treatment of situations broadly similar in character,
except for the political and economic interests of a state. The
writers believe that news, as well as editorial opinion, will be
strongly influenced by those interests and display predicable bias.
“An election held by a client-state government favoured by the US
officials would be treated differently by media than an election held
by a government that US official oppose,” write the authors.
The writers show that, “contrary to the usual image of the new media
as cantankerous, obstinate and ubiquitous in their search for truth
and defence of justice, in their actual practice they defend the
economic, social and political agenda of the privileged groups that
dominate domestic society, the state and the global order”.
Herman and Chomsky stress that US media do not function in the manner
of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, 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 internalised without awareness.”
The mass media of the United States, according to the writers, are
effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a
system — supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces,
internalised assumptions and self-censorship, and without significant
overt coercion.
Herman and Chomsky compare the media's treatment of victims of enemy
states and those of the United States and US client states.
“Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found
worthy and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than
those victimised by the United States or its clients, who are
implicitly unworthy,” write the authors.
Herman is a professor emeritus of French at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania. Chomsky is professor at the department of
linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The book can be found at Bustan Lil Kutob
bookstore in Shmeisani.
Hada Sarhan
Monday, May 19, 2003
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