Rating: 
Summary: Absorbing, Provocative Analysis of Media Bias!
Review: Since the path-breaking critical analysis of modern capitalist society as ruled by the power elite by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s, a number of social critics have noted the many ways in which the media plays a critical role in disarming and pacifying the general public through the manipulation and presentation of news and information. No one better summarizes the ways in which this is accomplished on a continuing basis than do these authors, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. The book focuses on what the authors refer to as a 'propaganda model', one comprising a heuristic framework that views the actual performance of the national media in terms of its rudimentary structural characteristics and the relational milieu in which they operate. Put into more simple terms, they observe the ways in which the fact of the media being the creation of the elite to promulgate their take on reality results from who inhabits the news room and collects the news, on the one hand, and who owns the means of media production, on the other.
According to the authors' views, not only does the media serve the interests of the power elite, but they promulgate and extend the general view of the world of those interests that both control and finance them. The powers that be have vested interests and ulterior goals and objectives that they wish to forward, and given their singular power to both influence and constrain the actions of the media, they have a unique ability to both shape and direct media policy and content. The means by which this undue influence is operated is through the selection of the people manning the posts of the media itself, through ensuring that those chosen to operate in the milieu are 'right-thinking' people who share their values, their goals, and their upper class perspectives. Given the selection criteria, it should be no surprise to discover the degree to which media professional share the internalized priorities and definitions of the power elite itself. The authors show how the use of the so-called free market model of the media leads inexorably toward the normative and extremely focused reporting characteristic of the conservative and pro-business values of the upper class. With lucid prose and illuminating case studies, they carefully document how the interaction of the American federal government and the corporate structure profoundly influence the content and context of everything Americans read, see on TV, and hear over the radio. Herman and Chomsky identify three major forces creating such a propaganda-prone media bias; first, the motivation for profit via the device of advertising; second, the fact that the media is embedded within, and controlled by, corporations whose views are predictably pro-business; and third, the near-exclusive use of information coming from highly biased sources. Taken in total, the authors handily demonstrate the ways in which information disseminated from the media to the public is heavily weighted toward the views, idea, and perspectives of the ruling class, and in this way the realities that surround us are systematically distorted. It is a media system which panders without shame toward to the interests and goals of the power elite ands which systematically ignores it stated obligation under the Constitution to inform ordinary citizens of what they need to know to act responsibly and knowledgably as active citizens in a democratic society. Enjoy!
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Summary: The Common Person's Review (for the non-intellectual)
Review: If you're looking for a very scholarly and academic review of this book thats laden with a bunch of big words, etc., read one of the other reviews. This is for the interested kid or student or person inclined towards radical politics who maybe doesn't have a Phd degree, or who doesn't sit around discussing the scholarly implications of books for the sake of showing off their superior intellect. First of all, don't be scaired by the 400 pages of the book. Its actually just barely above 300, with about 100 pages of appendixes and footnotes. It is a very readable book for anyone who has at least a vague idea of recent world affairs (of the past 3 decades or so). And even if you don't have much familiarity, after finishing this book, you certainly will. Some parts may be a bit overwhelming, but they are few and far between. The basic premise of the book is that the mainstream American corporate media (the big networks, the big newspapers, news magazines, etc)serve to uphold the interests of the elites in this country (political and economic). Chomsky and Herman acknowledge that we do have a "liberal" press, (what does it really mean to be 'liberal' in America today anyways?), but that the liberalness is kept within acceptable boundaries. Basically, the mainstream press may give a liberal slant on what the dominant institutions and systems are doing...but they will not question the very nature of the institutions and systems themselves. For example, today's Los Angeles Times (January 6,2003) had a page 2 story on the U.N sanctions against Iraq. Now, the typical reader may see the story, and figure that since the LA Times is even reporting on the impact of sanctions against Iraqi civillians, this is demonstrative of their 'liberal' leanings. However, the story leaves untouched the most crucial issues regarding UN sanctions against Iraq, such as:
1)the U.S. and U.K. are the sole countries who sit on the UN Secutity Council who refuse to lift the sanctions against Iraq, despite the pleas of the other member nations (such as Russia, France, China, etc).
2)UN estimates have put the death toll from the sanctions at nearly one million civillians.
3)Two consecutive UN Humanitarian Coordinators have resigned in the past five years in protest of the effect of the sanctions, with the first stating "We are in the process of destroying an entire society." Basically, the mainstream corporatized press will leave the most crucial questions unanswered, if they portray American power in a bad light. The last chapter on Laos and Cambodia are a bit tedious and confusing, but by the time you get to that chapter, the previous ones will have more than made their case. Overall, this is an excellent book, even for the non-academic, and will fundamentally alter the way you look at the media, and the 'facts' they are reporting.
Rating:
Summary: ignore the title, read the book
Review: The title and subtitle are misleading: this is not a book about the impact of media on the public or about the internal structures of the media. The first chapter does lay out a compelling but sketchy structural model explaining how an ostensibly free media could produce coverage so uncritically supportive of the government, but Chomsky and Herman focus most of their attention on proving that the media really are serving as the government's propaganda arm. They confine their analysis to foreign policy, and the evidence they offer is devastating. Particularly strong are chapters 2-3, which use quantitative data to compare the media coverage given to U.S. government enemy states and allied states. In chapter 2, a single state-sponsored murder in Soviet-client Poland is set against 100 state-sponsored murders in America's Central American client states in the 1980s. Surveying coverage in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and CBS News, those 100 murders combined consistently received less - and much less sympathetic or indignant - coverage than the one murder in Poland. Chapter 3 compares coverage of sham elections in the (U.S.-supplied) military terror states of Guatemala and El Salvador with that of flawed but generally democratic elections in official enemy Nicaragua. The broadly favorable and optimistic tone of reporting on elections staged by U.S.-supported death squad dictators provides a shocking contrast to the overwhelmingly critical (often polemical) approach to the more free and fair Nicaraguan elections. While these two chapters are written in a style of scholarly detachment with quantitative data to back up the qualitative analysis, the rest of the book is much more a polemic against U.S. foreign policy and media complicity with it. Reflexively pro-American readers are likely to be too alienated by the style to get anything out of it, but for those convinced by the evidence in chapters 2-3, Chomsky and Herman's analysis of the U.S. wars against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will prove highly educational. The updated edition contains a long preface demonstrating the continuing propaganda function of the media by reviewing coverage of events since the first edition came out in 1988. Particularly revealing is the contrast between heavy negative coverage given to Slobodan Milosevic's atrocities against the Kosovars and the perfunctory media attention to Turkey's very similar - but U.S.-funded - atrocities against the Kurds. As Chomsky and Herman show, the media only become critical of the government when some elite constituency like business or the Democrats speak out. And even then, criticism is tactical rather than fundamental. This was vividly demonstrated in the debate leading up the Iraq invasion, when the media allowed plenty of voices warning that American interests could in some way be damaged, but none that condemned war itself as immoral or that questioned the U.S. right to dominate other nations. As Chomsky and Herman make clear, this happens not as the result of any sort of conspiracy, but through the natural operation of indoctrination within media institutions and the structural constraints (e.g. relying almost exclusively on government officials as sources) on news gathering. That a free society could produce a deeply subservient media is perhaps the most disturbing conclusion of all.
Rating: 
Summary: Critique of Economic Media
Review: Ever since the term 'ideology' appears in the wake of the French Revolution its implications have haunted modernity (although an equal case could be made that it springs from the beginnings of civilization and/or religion, consider Constatantine's manufacture of consent), on the left as much as on the right. This book superbly carries the discussion into the present with its acute Propaganda Model and case studies thereof. The law of propaganda is too transparent in the totalitarian legacy, and leaves one unsuspecting of the subtler forms of media manipulation alive and well in the economy of late capitalism.
But it might also help to consider the legacy of leftist manufacture of consent, and before that the Hegelian candidate as it courted the Prussian world of the Restoration, leading into the stand up/sit down dialectic over ideology in the generation of Marx, at once exposing capitalist mystification, then crystallizing into 'late Hegelian' economism. The issue is important since the left is too often mesmerized by the remaining bits and pieces of the Second Internationale 'ideology' that so cleverly animated the 'myth' of Marxism. This legacy tends inject cliched sloganeering into social commentary, making it useless to progressives, and preempting clear commentary. In fact the discourse of Chomsky is well aware of this effect and successfully revives the essential critiques of the Left Hegelian era in a practical form.
The book has a fascinating bit on the early leftist print media of the early nineteenth century, a thriving industry, that slowly but surely succumbed to the new model of free market journalism. And it is interesting that(as pointed out in Desmond and Moore's bio of Darwin)that these newspapers were hot on 'evolution' in its radical phase. Then, of course, the estab Darwin came along and 'fixed' the idea of evolution with his ideological selectionism and Social Darwinism, and the greatest episode of 'manufactured consent' began in the field of biology. The problem is that they manufactured the consent of the left here, and by the time of Engels and after the confusions of theory and ideology were built into Marxism. Chomsky is (or was) one of the few Darwin critics left, let's hope they don't manufacture his consent here.
Great book.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Introduction into American Politics
Review: This book, along with the Godfather, is what inspired me to study Political Science at UCLA. His thesis, that the American Media is a mouthpiece for corporate and pentagon interests, is backed up with so much information and data, all footnoted, that after a while I was skimming through, thinking "all right already! I believe you!" And it's all presented in a delightfully intelligent matter. A perfect intellectual endeavor in a political forum which is generally too dominated by mudslinging and character assassinations to get any real ideas.
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Summary: How the US media really works
Review: Americans are not happy with the performance of the news media, and a number of scholars and pundits have given their two cents on the topic. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky --- who had already given more than two cents in the past --- joined forces to write their own critique in 1988. The result (reprinted in 2002 with a new forward) is one of the most important media studies ever written. The book comes in three sections: A propaganda model, a review of "alignment" news stories, and coverage of the Indochina wars. The propaganda model is fairly simple. The mainstream news sources are corporate entities with a set of built-in limitations. Reporters need to serve their government sources or they'll be out of the loop. Editors and owners will be watching for stories that slant the wrong way (too pro-union, for example). Meanwhile, freelance "flak" providers raise the red flag when a reporter --- or newspaper or TV channel --- is straying from the path of orthodoxy. During the Cold War, communism was used to keep the media in line. If you stray, you might be labeled a commie or a socialist. These terms changed to "liberal" during the late 1980s (and became institutionalized in the 1990s). The words are different, but the effect is the same. Chomsky has said in interviews that the emphasis on painting reporters as "reds" was too specific --- flak doesn't have to take the form of red-baiting. (The references in the book on this topic feel a little dated.) The second section is a collection of case studies in alignment: The media adopts a pro-US stance when covering foreign elections, demonizing official enemies, and counting victims from wars, massacres, and human rights violations. The case studies are over ten years old, but they still resonate today. Change the names of the countries from, say, Guatemala to Iraq and you have the same story: Reporters stay aligned with US policy by limiting their criticism to official enemies. The third section is an in-depth study of the media's coverage of wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This is the best part of the book. To say that these two authors know this subject is an understatement. They go through one story after another, showing how the media colluded with the US government to carry out a murderous, imperialist war against a peasant population. The war was ugly, and the atrocities had to be whitewashed to keep it going. Chomsky and Herman have made a major contribution here. This section is required reading for anyone who wants to know what really happened in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. The book ends with a Chomsky/Herman trademark: A mass of footnotes. Track down these sources and you'll learn even more, or just read the extra bits of information tucked into each footnote. (There are a number of references to unpublished papers by Alex Carey. These papers were later collected in a book called Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. That book is an essential part of Herman and Chomsky's critique.) If you want to understand the news media in the US, you should take a look at Manufacturing Consent. Herman and Chomsky make a case that is hard to refute. They discard to arguments over liberal versus conservative and get to the heart of the matter. Read this and you'll never watch the news the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: W/ Bible & A. Miller, this should be in every American home
Review: "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 they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful social interests that control and finance them.... In our view the...underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve 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...are...well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis." Noam Chomsky (MIT)
and Edward Herman (Wharton Business School)
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
From the Introduction Next to the Bible, Joseph Campbell's THE POWER OF MYTH and FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, the seminal work of psychologist Alice Miller, every single American home should have this book. Perhaps to a greater extent than even much of the other work of Noam Chomsky, MANUFACTURING CONSENT reveals the irony of where a truly moral path leads in our world. Meaning, the religious/moral paradigms of Christian Conservatism, embraced in the inner world of personal integrity and "family values" and followed to their obvious conclusion--our outer world structured by commerce and international politics--leads one invariably to finding GOD somewhere on the left of America's political center; far and away from the Limbaugh-isms on the radio. Anything less is either cancerous cynicism or delusional hypocrisy. Or both. "'Genocide' is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes. Thus, with Saddam Hussein and Iraq having been U.S. targets in the 1990s, whereas Turkey has been an ally and client and the United States its major arms supplier as IT engaged in its severe ethnic cleansing of Kurds during those years, we find...Turkey's treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq's treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for (U.S. Ambassador) Peter Galbraith, Turkey only 'represses,' while Iraq engages in 'genocide.'" From the Introduction (emphasis mine) This 2002 edition of the 1980s MANUFACTURING CONSENT has a new introduction written by the authors that includes some important words about the current Administration and foreign policy, as well the power of the Internet to affect the Media's status quo. But lest you think the bulk of this work is dated, trust me; their analysis has only become more accurate with the Clinton and Bush Administrations. The writers don't need to add specific revelations about, say, Enron, the true cause of 9/11 and the current secret war in Afghanistan to prove their point. (For example, see their comparative analysis of the painfully ironic relationship of the U.S. government with the Latin-American terrorist states Guatemala and El Salvador [we supported them militarily] and its adversarial relationship with the actual [though politically inconvenient] democracy Nicaragua during the Reagan years. Then compare this provable reality to the Media's Orwellian, fun-house mirror images and writings, as Chomsky and Herman show them to be. It is chilling. Through more than dozens of easily documented but heretofore underanalysed examples, the writers show how the dominant U.S. press (New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, etc.) so often becomes the propaganda tool of the U.S. government that only an analysis of this degree would help you to understand what must be its obvious actual function. This work, in fact, may be the only book that could prepare you or anyone well enough to read the revelations of investigative journalist Gary Webb in his book DARK ALLIANCE, the book that gives the full documented proof of the story that ironically ended his career in the 1990's: his discovery of the origins of America's Crack Cocaine era in "IranContra" and Reagan's CIA.) What the book lacks can be seen as a product of its internationally political perspective. The raison d'etre of this book is indeed all but stated outright with its final chapters on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam during and after the Vietnam War. (One could painfully envision Thomas Mann writing a similarly structured expose of the German media during World War Two, ending with documented proof of the otherwise hidden "final solution" for the Jews.) Through this they climactically prove, unquestionably, that the popular story of the Media's East-of-Eden break with Government & propaganda at this time in American history is, simply, a very useful myth. However, while Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and several other consumer advocates over the 20th Century are mentioned by them in this introduction, the kind of "muckraking" examples you'd expect in that context, regarding the purposely unreported crimes of big business (like those of the chemical, fast food and oil industries)--despite their adverse affects on human health and American culture--are almost conspicuously missing from this work. I would suggest, as a companion book, INTO THE BUZZSAW by investigative journalist Christina Borjesson, with its powerful Introduction by Gore Vidal. Just the same, I cannot imagine an honest critique of this book's contents that would not smack of a sincere desire (subconscious or otherwise) to be lied to, such that a primitive, cultish, cynically comfortable but inevitably destructive definition of American patriotism can have some illusion of moral validity. The opening chapters set you up so clearly and powerfully for their revealing of the U.S. supported holocaust of Indochina--again, displayed as final proof of their Propaganda Model's ubiquity--that you cannot help but walk away from this book with both an enlightened mind, and a broken heart. Agree or disagree with this book's premise, after reading MANUFACTURING CONSENT you will not be able to read the newspaper or watch CNN with the same naiveté again. That alone makes it a treasure.
Rating:
Summary: 25 Years Ahead of the Crowd--Vital Reading Today
Review:
It is quite significant, in my view, that today as I write this Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right is #2 at Amazon, and Sheldon Rapton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq is #114 at Amazon. Not only are the people awakening to the truth, which is that they have been had through a combination of inattention and manipulation, but these two books and several others in this genre are validating what Chomsky was telling us all in the past 25 years.
The ability to set the agenda and determine what is talked about and how it is talked about is at the root of hidden power in the pseudo-democratic society. Chomsky was decades ahead of his time in studying both the power of language and the power of controlling the media message. Today, as we recall that so-called mainstream news media *refused* fully-funded anti-war advertisements that challenged the White House lies (62 of which have been documented with full sourcing in various blogs, notably Stephen Perry's Bush at War blog), we must come to grips with the fact that America is at risk. Thomas Jefferson said "A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry" and Supreme Court Justice Branstein said "The greatest threat to liberty is an inert public." Today we lack the first and have the second, but as Amazon rankings show, the people, they are awakening. It is through reading, and following the links, and informed discussion, that the people can come together, using new tools for peer-to-peer information sharing and MeetUp's, and take back the power. Chomsky had it right. It took 25 years for all of us to realize he had it right. I rise in praise of this great man.
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Summary: Linguistics Genius' Detailed Case Study of Media Corruption
Review: By understanding how media corruption through capitalism happens without deliberate conspiratorial intention, we take the first step toward owning the truth that we've been behaving like imperialistic pigs, mostly without realizing it. Why the book was better than the film of the same title:
"The propaganda system is complicated, and the film seems to take a dive on the specifics instead of dealing with its essential details. The failure to explicate what exactly Chomsky means when he speaks of "thought control in a democratic society" allows the pejorative claim that his ideas are "conspiratorial" to seep into the argument. Tom Wolfe scoffingly impugns what he calls, "the cabal"- I doubt he's actually read Chomsky. Anyone who understands the propaganda model, even if they fervently deny its existence, realizes that it is not worthy of "conspiracy theory" derision. The film would have done well to debunk this myth." The stupid controversy created by right-wingers apparently for smoke purposes:
They raise the question of whether or not stuff happens, i.e. basically, do icky things happen when people in power try to conserve that power (aka conservatives)? Answer: such stuff happens, every day, a lot. This is the basic problem with conservatives, they don't (won't) recognize the negative side-effects of their behavior. It wasn't easy, but I got through this book. Details of Indochina, Salvador and Guatemala conflicts are tedious, but worth the effort in understanding the insidious webs of lies and denial that humans are capable of when thrust into decisions over national pride, national trust, economic and political preservation and humane conscience, and then seem to choose everything but the conscience. Basically: Wealthy American folks are trying to keep their fancy stuff, but with rampant inflation, apparently the only way a large corporation can keep its competitive edge, and thus remain successful, is to imperialize third world nations and extract slave labor from the natives. When some of the natives of these imperialized lands rebel and try to create a more honest democracy, they are named communists by our government and lying mass media in order to protect our corporations' interests. In extreme cases, such as San Salvador and Guatemala, phony military crises are created, again by our military in cahoots with our mass media, and American military forces are mobilized to quell the insurrection. Yes, that's right. We are the Empire, and they are the Rebel Alliance. Feel guilty yet? It all started in mid-1800s England (a lovely place) where the exploitation of the underclass had reached unprecedented levels of filth and squalor for factory and other lowly laborers. Out of this squalor, and certainly wrath, came such works as Marx' and Engels' Communist Manifesto. The British upper class was aware of the danger of peasant insurrection and its use of newspaper as medium for spreading. They invented newspaper advertising as a means of selective subscription, and the propaganda model was born: by giving advertisers and their clients a big piece of a newspapers' economic worth, such capitalists lay claim to news content, and freedom of the press becomes limited. The nature of such capitalistc limitations of press freedom lend themselves, on the very real macro level of our nation's more recent governmental ecopolitics, to fascism and its propaganda. So, the propaganda model here is not about conscious conspiracy, it's about tacet conspiracy. It's about the importance, to those interested in preserving the status quo, of maintaining a silent majority by lying to that majority and telling it that everything's just fine when it certainly is not. For a blinded society is easily fooled into believing its nation's policies are sound and humane when in fact it has become corrupt. It's a syndrome of denial. In order to keep it blind, thus silent, thus consenting, the society must be lied to about some of its less than concionable behavior and policies, policies that it has ostensibly voted for in democratic elections, but which were actually snuck into law, particularly foreign imperialistic policy. This book weeds out the important details of such governmental-media corruption from the gargantuan pile of news media surrounding the Indochina, San Salvador and Guatamala conflicts, circa 1960s-80s. This fact alone gives you an idea of the work involved for anyone in finding the real truth of world events. You don't get honest news from CNN, BBC or even many so called alternative news sources. You have to go direct to non publicized reports supplied by world health organizations and such, which Chomsky and researchers did ad nauseum. The result is a lucid, detailed case against our media and related governmental organizations. But once you've done the homework, you will understand NOT how evil conspirators are deliberately lying to you, NOT how unrelated events are somehow connected, but how anyone alligned with a nation that practices imperialism ultimately must choose between its national allegiance and humane dignity, and how so much of American media is a product of those in economic and political power making the former choice. Do this homework by thoroughly reading this book and understanding how the propaganda model works, and is currently working overtime. Then see the film and, as they say a picture is worth a thousand words, grimace as you watch footage of a young girl from an imperialized nation trying in vain to find shelter from the street gunfire going off around her. We all caused that gunfire, by not paying enough attention, and letting the liars pursuade us to let them get away with murder - ironically, all in the name of protecting our rich, white butts! I'd rather be poor with a healthy conscience. You?
Rating: 
Summary: Noam Chomsky is an idiot
Review: This book was a mandatory read for my propaganda class at UCLA. If colleges didn't force people to read this smut, his book would be even lower than his 1800 on amazon.com. Noam Chomsky's whole argument is based on cause correlation which is an inherently flawed way to measure the media's reporting. Chomsky believes that when one event occurs it is directly related to another. Anybody who understands how to do research knows that you can't rely on this method to make valid conclusions. To make up for this discrepancy, Chomsky repeats himself a thousand times throughout the book. This book gets my lowest score. I highly recommend Anne Coulter's book Slander which does a much better job of explaining biases in the media. She presents facts explaining how the media is liberal, not conservative.
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