Rating: 
Summary: Dated, derivative and erroneous
Review: Chomsky and Herman here set out to describe a process whereby the consent of the masses is secured by their rulers and in spite of their objective interests. As a concept, this is not new - it accords with the Gramscian notion of hegemony, and the concept popularised by Marcuse of false consciousness - and Chomsky and Herman's variant yields neither distinctive insights nor social-scientific procedures. It does, however, yield a rather dispiriting glimpse into the values and mores of what Lionel Trilling aptly termed the adversary culture, of which Noam Chomsky is an indefatigable representative.The authors' premise is that the communications media in capitalist society conform to a 'propaganda model'. With this model, it is apparently possible to delineate "the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print [and] marginalise dissent". Thus the media define the limits of public debate by ignoring views that fall outside a pre-determined consensus. The authors claim to provide scientific substantiation to their claim with five 'filters', but in essence their method is to look at what constitutes the 'progressive' side of debate in the media, and then claim that they and people like them are systematically excluded from that debate by not being asked to contribute. (Other observations by the authors rarely extend beyond truisms and non sequiturs - e.g. news organisations aim to be profitable; some people with political views that the authors disagree with regularly have op-eds published - and we may safely put them aside.) As a contribution to political sociology, this is, to say the least, question-begging, in the strict, technical sense that the methodology assumes the truth of the conclusions the authors are supposed to be proving. It is patently true that some views do not get aired - or at least not regularly - in mainstream media: Holocaust denial doesn't; flat-earth advocacy doesn't. The question is not whether a media consensus exists, but whether it amounts to bias against credible alternative accounts and conforms to what Chomsky and Herman claim is a monolithic structure of corporate interests. The issue comes down, in short, to whether the views Chomsky and Herman propound are themselves a credible alternative account. On the issues they choose to focus on in this book, that conclusion is very difficult to sustain. They rehearse a typical melange of complaints against the policies of the US and Israel, and then present these as unexceptionable judgements. The complaints are, in fact, very far from being a credible and well-researched alternative account. To talk of anti-Communism as a 'national religion', as these authors do, is to subsume a wide variety of political views into a bogus abstraction. What is the similarity in outlook between, say, National Review and Arthur Schlesinger Jnr except that both espouse anti-Communist views? What is the sense of talking about 'neo-Fascist national-security states' in Latin America but making no such stricture about a totalitarian police-state such as Cuba? In practice, readers disinclined to examine every footnote, analyse every heroic assumption, and disinter every tendentious premise, might be misled into believing there is something in what the authors say, especially if they are already ideologically predisposed to the authors' political opinions. But there is, in truth, precious little here except a catalogue of personal complaints that the authors' own political opinions are not taken seriously by the people, and that, ex hypothesi, the people must have been duped. Needless to say, the perfectly accurate premise that most voters are averse to the far-Left does not generate the authors' conclusion that the people can't be aware of their own interests. Rather, the authors' patent disregard for the way most people in the electorates of advanced democracies reason is an indication of how far removed the far-Left is from normal canons of civilised discourse. A neat example of this is unintentionally given by the authors themselves in their complaint (this was in 1988) that new items distinguish between the liberal democracies of the west and the totalitarian societies of the Communist bloc, and that "rooting for 'our side' [is] considered an entirely legitimate news practice". Well, yes, indeed it is: just as rooting for our side against Nazi Germany was considered a sine qua non of responsible journalism by George Orwell. The alternative would have been to betray the notion of objective journalism by failing to describe the world accurately; and the world in 1988 could properly be described only as a division between imperfect but civilised democracies in the west, and grotesque if decrepit totalitarian tyrannies in the east. That Chomsky and Herman didn't see this says more about their own set of values than it does about a supposedly corrupt communications media.
Rating: 
Summary: Of critical importance to understanding the world
Review: This book summarizes much of what Chomsky and Herman have been saying for decades on various events and how US media interprets them in the form of well documented case studies. The book begins by outlining a Propaganda Model, 5 filters through which news must pass before making it to the mainstream American news: -size, ownership and profit orientation
-Advertising as major revenue
-News sourcing
-"flak"
-anti-communism ( more appropriately, ideology) Basically a news item must generally be in the interests of the huge conglomerations that own them, must not offend advertisers and often comes from Government experts and members of think tanks with a "liberal" or right wing bias (liberal practically means right wing these days). If a news item steps out of line, as does happen on occasion, there will be flak generated (from groups like Accuracy in Media, AIM, or from a variety of right-wing pundits, for example) which will make the media source think twice about taking this point of view a second time. If a story is not sufficiently anti-communist (pro-capitalist, anti-"terrorist"), it will not likely make the major news. The book goes on in detail about each of the filters and their relative importance and function, and then goes on to look at specific case studies of events and the American News media's interpretation of these events. "Worthy and Unworthy Victims" looks at the case of a priest murdered in Poland by Polish police in 1984 (under Communist rule) vs. over 100 religious murders by state police in US client regimes in Latin America from 1968 from 1985, and how the media treated these two cases. In their model the priest will get much more coverage than the people killed by US clients with US support (4 were even US nuns!). The results are shocking, with 78 articles on Jerzy Popieluszko (the priest in Poland) vs. only 57 mentions of nearly 100 murders in Latin America. Next they cover Third World elections, comparing in a very objective manner the coverage of "demonstration" elections in US client states vs. the Nicaraguan Elections of 1984. Again the Propaganda Model predicts that the elections in client countries, no matter how brutal, no matter how much intimidation exists, will legitimize fascist regimes, whereas the Sandinista election is portrayed as meaningless, as an essentially undiscussed fact. They go into some detail as to what the conditions surrounding a free election are and generally by any objective measure the Nicaraguan election comes much closer (by no means perfect, but look at the 2000 US election for an interesting comparison!) than that of the Dominican Republic of 1966, El Salvadore in 1982 and 1984, or in Guatamala in 1984-1985, all extreme terror states with well documented murders and tortures going on every day during the periods in question. As predicted, the media follow the US government line, and do not call into question some very obvious propaganda efforts. The KGB/Bulgarian plot to assassinate the pope shows their Propaganda Model to be bang on yet again, with some facts that the media should be very embarrassed about today, from motives (why on earth would the KGB hire a Turk, who is a known associate with an extremist right-wing group to kill the pope???), to the fact that no trace of a connection was ever proven. The final case deals with the Indo-China wars, and how these were dealt with, Vietnam in one chapter, and Cambodia and Laos in in the next. The main point they discuss is the widely held view that the media "lost the war" by their aggressive stances and negative coverage. Without too much difficulty they show this idea to be self-serving propaganda, as the criticism levelled was mostly tactical, and rarely (never!) questioned the morality of the war in the first place. The Cambodia material is what apologists for state violence really latch onto to create false claims made by the authors. The argument goes that they questioned what was going on in Cambodia in 1975, based on the information available at that time, which by extension implies denial of Khmer Rouge atrocities. This is simply not true, as many quotes from the book easily demonstrate. Speaking of the three phases of the decade of genocide in Cambodia: "Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge..." This hardly sounds like a line form Pol Pot supporters, but truth is of little importance to the ones who actually are apologizing for massive crimes, namely Phase I (1970 - 1975) when the US was bombing Cambodia into a moonscape, killing an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. How people who criticise Chomsky and Herman for being Khmer Rouge Apologists (their crimes were something which we in the west had no control of) while ignoring the huge crime committed by the US in the years leading up to the Pol Pot era is beyond hypocrisy. Chomsky and Herman claim that the scale of both atrocities is of about the same scale, yet phase one is always ignored in all of the negative reviews of their works, and generally in the media.
Even more telling is the fact that The west then SUPPORTED Pol Pot in phase 3 of the genocide, as now the Khmer Rouge were fighting the Vietnamese. Again the hypocrisy is beyond words. In summary, this is a very important work on the functioning of modern industrial democracies, and how citizens are not provided the information they need to properly assess world events. An added bonus in the re-released version (2002) is a new introduction essay which speaks of how their model fares with more recent events such as NAFTA, the Seattle protests, and Kosovo, to name a few. If you are truly interested in why the world we live in has become such a bizarre and increasingly violent place, this is a good place to start, from two authors who have not shied away from the truth for decades.
Rating:
Summary: Another White Man's Burden
Review: When imperial Britain went on its mission of conquest, with all the rape, pillaging and exploitation entailed therein, the ruling imperial elites sold the idea that this was the White Man's Burden - the idea that what was being done was essentially a mission of mercy, a mission to bring 'civilisation' to the rogue savages of the world. It was a sick joke.
Likewise, we have an analogous situation today where the murderous deeds of US foreign policy are sold as bringing the values of 'freedom' and 'democracy' to an obstinate world which refuses to walk with us into the 21st Century. It's another sick joke, and this book is an important contribution to understanding some of the machinations of mass media which help to promote this myth.
Rating: 
Summary: a creative model & method, but narrowly focused in scope
Review: Herman and Chomsky create a compelling model of how five filters (ownership, advertising, official sources, flak, and ideology) skew the news media. Their narrative case studies (eg, the coverage of the attempted assasination of john paul II) falls into the familiar pattern of, the media says X, but I think Y, so the media are liars. However their pseudo-experiments are extremely convincing. For these analyses, they quantify the press coverage of comparable events (crooked elections and clergy assassinations) committed by American allies and American enemies and find that malfeasance by the Warsaw Pact and Sandinistas was much more publicized than comparable crimes by pro-US Salvadoran and Guatemalan juntas.
Nonetheless, there are three notable limitations to the book:
1) There is no connection between the mechanisms of the theory and the evidence, that is, while their evidence shows the predicted result (hegemonic distortion), it is not connected to specific filters in the model. For instance, they fail to show whether low coverage of Guatemalan clergy assasinations were caused by advertiser pressure, reliance on official sources, or one of the other filters.
2) The book focuses exclusively on Cold War foreign policy, at least in its data, and does not address any other news topics. Therefore, it's problematic to assume that since the media is demonstrably anti-communist it will also be, for example, anti-abortion. It's possible that the media may skew right on some issues, left on others, and be unbiased on yet other issues.
3) Related to my second point, even if the filters all run in one direction for foreign policy, they may contradict each other or have more nuanced effects for other issues. For instance, Lichter and Rothman's poll data (Public Opinion Quarterly articles) show the media elite to be centrist on most social issues. Likewise, Gitlin (Inside Prime Time) shows that the television industry strives to avoid offending both left and right. Neither of these are congruent with assuming uniformly conservative effects of the "advertising" and "ideology" filters.
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow, Trite, Without Insight and Unimportant.
Review: I began to read this book with some hesitation. I was aware of the reputation of Noam Chomsky as someone of erudition. I was afraid that I would not be capable of successfully following the subtle arguments of a world class intellectual. This hesitation was not justified. Chomsky and Herman quote from Jacques Ellul's book 'Propaganda' in the preface to this book. They do so without apparent insight or irony. Ellul brilliantly analyzed the nature of propaganda in his book. He noted that the purveyor of propaganda necessarily became its victim. The reader of 'Manufacturing Consent' is subjected of to hundreds of pages of shrill rhetoric masquerading as analysis. Non sequiturs follow non sequiturs to support unsubstantiated claims. There is truth in this book. However these are derivative and obvious truths. Every page of the book is filled with details designed to support the authors' thesis that the media reflects a societal viewpoint and that other viewpoints are discouraged. The surprising thing about the book is that the authors seem to think that this is some sort of novel idea. They spend hundreds of pages showing that the facts of some historical events could be interpreted differently within another viewpoint. The sad thing about this so-called analysis is that the authors present their own interpretation as the unvarnished truth as opposed to the self-serving propaganda that other viewpoints provide. The facts are myriad, the analysis is predictable and the conclusions are trite. The authors seem not to sense the irony of quoting Ellul in a book that shows the truth of his insight that the purveyor of propaganda is one of its victims. If they had created a book that followed from Ellul's seminal insight and showed the danger that a society falls into when its core beliefs become propaganda, they could have created a significant book. However that book would not be 'Manufacturing Consent.' Society to function must have a set of core beliefs to inspire its members to cooperate on grand social aims. Members of society must be prepared to sacrifice some of their own self-interest to facilitate grander societal aims. This can range from support for the arts to aid for the indigent and sick. However as Ellul showed these core beliefs can acquire the status of emotion and become irrational. They acquire a status beyond their purpose and since they have become irrational they can be used to suppress any alternative view. Alternative views cannot be analyzed; they are a danger and so must be suppressed. Society becomes imprisoned in a straightjacket of beliefs and cannot adapt to new circumstances. Ellul saw this. Ellul wrote a brilliant book on propaganda. The authors of this book wrote a book trying to show that their analysis of historical events is more 'accurate' than that of the mass media. This may or may not be so but it is largely unimportant. The important issue is not about the motivations of some dead politicians but how a society can protect itself from its own propaganda. Ellul tried to show this. Popper tried to show this. Herman and Chomsky prove the same shallow point over and over again. They are not wrong in their ideas and assertions. It is just that they are shallow, trite, without insight and unimportant. If you want to know about propaganda read Ellul. He said it before Herman and Chomsky. He said more than Herman and Chomsky. And he said it with insight.
Rating: 
Summary: Paranoid, paranoid, paranoid...
Review: What do you get when you combine a conspiratorial 'their out to get us' mindset with a decent written book? A bunch of yahoo's either sad about thier lives or feeling guilty about what they have who blame the rich for everything (and then ignorantly assume you listen to Rush Limbaugh if you disagree with them). I give it 2 extra stars for being well written; it is a pretty package and disguises its ranting ok. Of course the media is biased; towards the political beliefs of the reporters. Not towards the rich, not towards the liberals. Sure, most reporters are democrats. But its no conspiracy. And to suggest that its biased for the rich is even more rediculous.
Rating:
Summary: Systems analysis of the news media
Review: Herman and Chomsky argue that our news media channels follow a propaganda model which governs the editorial policy of the particular channel. The model results in a tacit protection of the status quo, where facts inconvenient to the governing policy are left out or placed in a context that lacks either focus or outrage. This is not caused by an explicit conspiracy, but is rather the result of economic and supply (information source alignment) realities. In the US, we give a great deal of attention to the problem of physical threat as the largest enemy to our closely held ideal of a free press. Herman/Chomsky force the reader to consider other (perhaps more effective) methods of coercion. To support their assertion about the relevance of this model, Herman and Chomsky use paired examples. They choose an instance of an event which occurs in at least two countries (elections, atrocities, etc.). They then make a comparison between how the US media treats that event when given two countries on different sides of the US government friend/foe line. They do not argue that facts are per se suppressed, but rather focus on the context of the presentation of the facts and the relationship between media entities and their owners/advertisers/government forces. Herman/Chomsky clearly have a political flavor (as do most commentators) but regardless of whether the reader agrees with the entirety of their evidence, it is difficult to dismiss the model which has been built here with such painstaking care. Anyone who is a student of media or political economy will benefit from reading _Manufacturing Consent_.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling in its implications
Review: This is a fantastic work. The authors put out a model in the standard scientific mode, and proceed to test their model against available data. All such data, the media coverage of three seperate 'events', is documented indepth. They prove their model to a very high degree. The first chapter is somewhat dense, and in spots this is true elsewhere. Also, at times the writting gets somewhat emotional, but that can hardly be faulted when you look at the subject matter. Personally I have always felt that the media leaves things unsaid, that news stories break and unfold to a rhythm that is just out of sight. Something else besides 'breaking news' is what drives what we see and read in the dailies. Chomsky and Herman not only show that those feelings are right, but prove them in a scientifically rigorous fashion. The chilling part of this work is that it was published before the Clinton era. The main theme is one of the media being used as an adjunct to our foreign policy, making it easier to for the US to commit what we would othewise call autrocities, etc.; thing we typically expect of Third World dictatorships and their propaganda machines. It is horrifically clear that the 'powers' turned those same techniques against their political, cultural and ideological enemies within America during the last decade. If anything, the 'dominant' sectors of society have refined their methods, subverting the 'free press' into outright tools for advancement of their cause, in deteriment to a civil, democratic society. I would like to see the authors give an update to this work, taking into account the impeachment, the Presidential election and the subsequent powerplays. I doubt it would be published.
Rating:
Summary: Vice or Virtue?
Review: In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman developed a model of how the corporate media functions and give unlikely historical examples that comport with their model. According to them, several filters operate on the corporate media, including: 1) the size, ownership, and profit orientation of the corporate media, 2) The influence of advertisers, 3) The influence of the symbiotic relationship between sources(e.g. the gov't), 4) The influence of "Flak" organizations, and 5) anti-socialism, the prevailing ideology of the propertied classes. I agree with most of the conclusions of the book. They claim that there are worthy and unworthy victims -- the media having double standards with respect to the Indochina wars, elections and violence in Central America, and the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope. However, there are several bad assumptions in the overall theory, and the methodology itself could be revamped to enable what should be a very powerful argument. The worst assumption is that men are blank slates in front of a powerful culture. For example, take the fifth point above. This is a Marxist assumption that people are soulless receptacles of an economic class, a culture, a work environment, et cetera. The venerable Chomsky, the King of Nativism, knows better than promote epiphenomenalism. Implying that people brainwashed seems childish over a decade later with the prominence of the Internet. Secondly, the methodology borders on "scientism." A hypothesis is formulated that the media espouses a political agenda. The five points above are mentioned in the first chapter. The authors set out to "confirm" this by picking unlikely examples where we expect their "propaganda" model to fail-- Vietnam, Cambodia, et cetera. This is faulty for several reasons. First of all, it opens the door to objections -- many will object to the numbers killed in Cambodia, the strategic implications of Vietnam, and will differ as to what specific process changes the views of the common man and the elites with respect to the war. They would be much better served if the LOGIC of the mass media was expounded, and how this specifically relates to the processes in motion. By looking at the logical foundations of the media, one would learn why programming is presented in a certain matter, what influences the local news as compared to the national programming, the media's history, financial forces, et cetera that would encompass ALL aspects of our dynamic media. For example-- take the NFL, Britney Spears, the WWE, or soap operas. Is there anyway to explain them under Chomsky's model besides the absurdity of some ruling class using football to keep the masses in their place? The common-sense, economic, consumerist view of the media is more applicable in most cases. It is impossible to reduce Sesame Street, the Cartoon Network, C-SPAN, and other elements to mysterious class forces. Hence, I agree that the scale of the media, along with many economic forces have created a "corporate" bias in the media, particularly the evening news. I would stop short from claiming that there is a conspiracy out there. The media -- which interlocks with many components, has its own internal structure, and relates to millions of consumers, should be analyzed systemically. This is a fun and important book if one can get past the Cold War assumptions and implications inundating it. The authors, instead of explicating the fundamental dynamics or universal laws of the media and information in society, paint an image where one stands back and says, "look at the media! They are hypocrites!" While the conclusions are sound, the method leaves much to be desired. As la Rochefoucauld put it, "hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." ...
Rating:
Summary: Content Management - Capitalistic Variety.
Review: Noam Chomsky, in his own style,unleashes various filters that content have to go through before getting published. Talk of Content Management here! Corporate Business Houses, Advertisement Revenues, anti-communism (RED fear) have affected the way the information is sourced and massaged for public consumption. Infact, the source of the information is given the highest respect so as to keep the flow of information (massaged) smooth. The media in the US acts as a propoganda machinery rather than as a information house. The book will allow the reader to clearly demarcate the boundary between the US Government and the public. This demarcation is essential in understanding the media's objective to mislead the American public on range of issues including foreign policy, economics and third world pseudo democracies. In fact, the movie "Insider" is a good complement to this book.
|
