Media Control : The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media)

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Summary: Validation at last!
Review: A co-worker, who used to listen to me rant, recommended that I read Chomsky. I ignored the advice for several years thinking no one could understand or even know what it was that I was so positively enraged about in our so called 'free' country. I went on hunting for validation that never came. Until finally, I picked up this little gem! Ah! The fact that I felt isolated in my 'subversive' views is even a part of Chomsky's little essay. This little book is pure concentrate.
Chomsky's focus is on the foreign policies of the US, but one can easily extend his thesis to simple domestic uses of propaganda. In other words, the ways in which a person will champion certain rhetoric to gain support which in so doing gains power from people who willingly give up freedoms.
Remember three things:
1. All art is propaganda
2. Propaganda is to the free society what the iron fist is to the totalitarian society.
3. A free society is not necessarily defined by what one is free to do, rather what one is free NOT to do.
I have been a Chomsky-ite for years, but never knew it. This is an outstanding starting point to his other works.

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Summary: are we sheep that we believe everything we're told?
Review: After reading this book, you will not listen to the news again without wondering if you are being given a spin or what. Basically we are lied to all the time. We are manipulated by those that control the media and Chomsky points out time and again many examples of how it has been done. I don't know about you, but I am tired of listening to the news and wondering how much of it is just propaganda and how much we can believe.

Chomsky is brilliant! Everyone should read this book and then they will at least get a better idea of how many of the events that have happened are not always quite what the media led us to believe. Look a little deeper and use your own minds to come to your own conclusions. Enjoy!

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Summary: Bitter, charged, quick introduction to Chomsky's thinking
Review: As a brief and pithy introduction to Chomsky's anti-imperialistic thinking about media control, and as a charged denunciation of mass propaganda in the modern world (particularly US), this is a very fast-paced, slim, and intriguing read. But if you are looking for material that substantiates his claims with hard, quantitative evidence, you'd do better with a somewhat more detailed treatise from Chomsky, e.g., "Manufacturing Consent".

This though is a somewhat embittered manifesto, spewing out bits on how administrations in the past from Wilson to Bush Senior have manipulated the public into war with unlikely, usually defenceless enemies. This edition sports a new speech "The Journalist from Mars," which lends a refreshingly dissident tenor to the chorus of patriotism. The 31 new pages are particularly relevant today as President Bush picks up where his father left off, once again calling a fear-ridden population to war.

Media Control might sound like a flaming rant but it is a good, crisp lead-in into Chomsky's thinking -- likely to be misinterpreted unless you are also familiar with his work otherwise. But his ideas are a welcome second opinion at a time when we should be questioning more than ever whether the spurious memes of "War on Terror", "Shock and Awe" etc are really about terrorism or tyranny at all, or a nearly-successful PR agenda pandering to the big few.

A highly engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening!
Review: Just in case you thought you knew about how the media stinks get ready, you haven't seen anything yet. Unlike most political writers, Chomsky uses EXTENSIVE research in portraying the true power the media has on the way we think. Don't forget that this guy is a Linguistics professor at MIT so he definitely has a wealth of knowledge on the science of language and he applies this knowledge into his writings. You might never realize how much nonsense we get fed until you read this book or perhaps a book like it. Great read!!

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Summary: small book... powerful ideas.
Review: Media Control is perhaps the best short introduction to Chomsky's thought on politics and propaganda around. Whereas books like 9-11 and "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" are choppy and prone to misunderstood interpretations by readers not already accustomed to Chomsky, Media Control is coherent, in depth and very easy and quick to read. The essay is from the time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq known as "Desert Storm" and traces the uses of propaganda and misinformation from that era back to the Wilson era and Walter Lippmann's theory of media control. Chomsky perhaps displays his dry wit in this short volume more than anywhere else, with his comparisson of the typical slogan "support our troops" to the absurd slogan "support the people in Iowa." What this makes clear, is the emptiness of the slogan. The question "do you support our troops?" cannot be answered with a "no" unless one is completely depraved. That question however masks the underlying question "do you support our policy?" which is something that elites in the govt. and media would prefer you not think about, because the answers would be more ambiguous and require real democratic discussion. The rulers and media heads would prefer to make those decisions for you, through what Lippmann dubbed "consent without consent". The mass media (now controlled largely by six major firms who all have holdings and enter into joint ventures with one another.) constrain debate on issues to within a moderate range, so of course most of the media will look to be at the "liberal" end of the allowed spectrum, but that only has the effect of cutting anything further to the "left" out of the discussion, so arguments many tend to go between something like the "hawks" who are for immediate war, unilaterally, and the "doves" largely represented in the media, who may tend to stand for "multi-lateralism" or waiting for more info. Thus, many who have other ideas on the subject are left out of mainstream debate, and thus seem to not exist. What we are left with is a host of false-dichotomies and debates that we don't even want to be in.
... Also, this new edition of Media Control is expanded to include transcript of a talk, previously printed in FAIR, which is a little thought experiment about how a journalist from Mars (which is what journalists who work with a critical edge are often treated like), who is highly trained at the best journalism schools in the U.S., would cover the "war on terrorism." It is interesting to read the current essay in light of the essay on the Iraq conflict ten years past. (and the new cover and print is much more attractive than the 1st edition).

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Summary: An introduction to Chomsky's media analysis
Review: Noam Chomsky's description of US foreign policy often causes people to ask, "If this is true, why haven't I heard about it?" That led Chomsky to write about the mainstream news media. His explanation is simple enough to understand, but it needs a lot of documentation to back it up. So Chomsky wrote a short stack of heavily-footnoted books on the topic, such as Necessary Illusions and (with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent. But it can be intimidating to pick up one of those books, so Chomsky wrote this introduction.

The footnotes are gone (more or less). The basic picture of the US news media --- how it works and who it serves --- is here, but in condensed form. If you want the nuances, the sources, and the case studies, you'll have to read his other books. Once you have a grasp of the broad outlines, you can get into the specifics much more easily.

This second edition adds the transcript of a talk Chomsky gave a few years ago. It was printed in FAIR's media watchdog magazine, Extra. In it, Chomsky imagines a Martian as an outside observer, someone who can analyze human affairs without being inside it. The Martian idea works well because so many Americans feel outside the mainstream media's message --- as Chomsky describes the current war on terror from the Martian point of view, you find yourself in total agreement.

The rest of the book is just as good. Chomsky talks about the history of the media as a voluntary propaganda arm of the government, citing examples from World War I to the Gulf War. His ten-year-old comments on Iraq (including references to WMDs) show how the old news has been re-packaged for a new decade. It's a new century, but it's the same old lies..

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Summary: Propaganda about propaganda? Yawn...
Review: Unfortunately Dr. Chomsky chooses to ignore that little facts of Soviet and Communist and Nazi propaganda machines within their own states, when referring to historical examples. Goebbels and Stalin are a head above of anyone in histroy as far as domestic propaganda is concerned. Unquestionably, media everywhere is biased and it does take intelligence to read between the lines and not take every opinion media presents as fact, which as a matter of fact is something they don't really hide, after all, since all the media analysts do present is their opinion. And yes media is a political forum of sorts, where there is a freedom to express various "conflicting" opinions, something a non-democratic society would not allow. Now, voters, as such, can reflect to which opinion they succumbed or which opinion they hold at the voting booths, and as a result affect albeit not quiet directly both forcing and domestic policies. Now, as far as ignorance. I may not hold a doctorate, nor invovled in political science much. But I did notice a few things. How it may have escaped, Mr. Chomsky's notice, I do not know, but Neo Nazis almost won election in France, there had to be a run-off between Chirac and the challenger and Neo-Socialists won election in Austria. Now, it may strike Mr. Chomsky stange, but I would choose US democracy against any of those. It may also escaped Mr. Chomsky's notice but US has been in a Cold war for the past 50 of the last 60 years, and a result of actions necessary, to prevent the spread of communistm, US and it's allies were forced to adapt and choose between lesser evils. Now that U.S. is done dealing with cold war, guess what? Time has come to deal with those lesser evils, some of which were coincidentally spawned in the process of the Cold War, especially, since they began to present clear and present danger to US security, namely Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and to certain extent Iraq, albeit reasoning behind Iraqi war is extremely questionable. U.S. had no choice but get involved in both Kosovo and Bosnian conflicts, precisely because UN and our European allies have proven useless and powerless to stop the inflamation of those conflicts, which threatened to engulf the whole of Europe and then the World in another World War. After all both World Wars of the last century were based on combination of motives: ethnical superiority/intolerance and/or border disputes. UN has so far has proven usless and powerless in regards to ethnic and religious conflicts in Africa: Somalia, Rwanda, DR Congo, Sudan, I could go on and on. What Mr. Chomsky fails to understand is that, having evolved as a World Leader during the Cold War, US wound up with no choice but having to pick sides in every piece of pie out there and now has to deal with it. As history has shown, policy of isolation is worse, since it dragged US into two World Wars in the span of 23 years. What Mr. Chomsky and his advocates also fail to understand is that, Hitleristique posture of Taliban and Al-Qaueda about their superiority, and forcing people of other religions to wear marked clothing (something if you know history similar that happened before concentration camps in WWII in german controlled territories) and destcution of cultural heritage of others, mass murder, had to be stopped. Especially, since on the way to building their caliphate, they AQ directly and Taliban by association have attacked US numerous times, and have been involved in every civil war, directly or indirectly in Europe and Asia in the past 10 years. Yes, Chechnya and Russia is just one example, Khattab was a direct representative of Bin Ladin there and advised as well helped run operations there. Despite, for attempts to justify their actions, people must understand that US will not mediate with people bent on their destructions and will not go to UN, as it did not go to the league of Nations, throughout history, since both UN and the League has proven useless and ineffective without the backing of US. All UN achievements can be directly attributed to US and its allies. Everyone else is just using it to spy on each other and push their national agenda, without really contributing much of anything, which, incidentally what UN was created for, in order to help prevent/resolve armed conflicts. In conclusion, although highly enterntaining, the conspiracy theories of Dr. Chomsky are hardly coherent, when taken in a full historical and sociological context. And unfortunately seem to do the same thing to some people that Mr. Chomsky claims media does. Of course his book is a form of media and propaganda.