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Summary: a masterpiece
Review: This is a truly stimulating book where Herman and Chomsky dissect the media machinery and expose its components. In this scientific, well documented study the authors unsettle some of the basic assumptions of the American freedom mythos
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Summary: The Devil is in the Details
Review: And Chomsky provides many of them. Chomsky has great faith in the people's ability to determine their own interests and judge complex issues IF THEY ARE GIVEN FACTUAL INFORMATION. In the book, he DEMONSTRATES how the U.S. media failed to give full and factual information regarding Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, to name a few.He's on record as saying that the facts of the holocaust are so clear that it makes no sense to debate them. His relation to Robert Faurisson is that he defended him from persecution for his ridiculous beliefs. Chomsky said, "You either believe in freedom of speech for those ideas you detest or you don't believe in freedom of speech." Pretty radical, huh? In the book itself, he describes the media's body count in Cambodia, which ranged from tens of thousands to 2 million. His main criticism of the media on this subject was their relative silence on the atrocities occuring simultaneously in Ea! st Timor (the CIA called it the worst genocide in relation to population since the holocaust). But, since our political and economic ally, Indonesia, was committing the genocide there, the press saw little need to report it. This is the essence of the book. To dismiss it, without addressing ANY of the documented facts within, as "conspiracy theory" is, at best, intellectually weak, and at worst, dishonest. Chomsky believes in an informed public to such a degree that it makes those who would "represent" the masses a little nervous.
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Summary: Fabulous!!!!
Review: Okay, this is one of the most thought provoking and insightful pieces I have ever read. Read it for a Marxist class in college and I must say, this book really opened my suburban, white bread eyes as to the ways of the world and the mirrored reality of the media. Granted, it did make me a bit paranoid, but well worth the read. One of the few college textbooks I read cover to cover and ahead of schedule. Noam Chomsky is amazing, this man has become my idol. I consider this book my bible. WOW!!!!
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Summary: Necessary reading for those who wish to stay informed
Review: This wonderful book is a heavily referenced, fastidious study of why news organizations report the news the way they do. A primary illustrative example is the coverage of the genocide in Cambodia (atrocities which Chomsky recognizes as such, but is accused of downplaying when he questions the sincerity of the press coverage of the event) as compared to the genocide in East Timor. Cambodia's was brought about by communists (at least the latter half of the genocide, as the first half was created by massive U.S. bombing) and so received vast amounts of attention and exaggeration (ah, but to demonstrate this is to "systematically downplay" the act itself!). East Timor's was brought about by our financial ally General Suharto who used U.S. training and weapons to committ his atrocities and so we get much less coverage in the same press that seems to care so much for the innocents slaughtered in Cambodia. It's an excellent illustration, all heavily referenced. Chomsky's greatest strength, in my opinion, is his policy to tell his readers not to believe the things he says simply because he says them. He asks people to look up his references, to find out for themselves if what he's saying is the truth. Unfortunately, what he says is so upsetting to some, not only will they refuse to confirm it (out of fear of having to change their views) they won't even listen in the first place.
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Summary: Ciritical to understanding press censorship in America.
Review: Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 1988 analysis of press censorship in America, is an insightful look at the ways public opinion and choices can be molded by dominating interests in a free society. Its value lies in the model Herman and Chomsky develop and test to account for this censorship; while they limit their investigation to a few specific cases -- three 1980s Central American elections, the alleged 1981 KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope, and the Indochina Wars -- their model is testable and can be applied and modified to a variety of events. Obviously, not all happenings in the world can fit between the covers of the New York Times. Herman and Chomsky outline five filters, interrelated to some extent, through which these events must pass in order to become newsworthy. First, huge transnational businesses own much of the media - a fact probably more true now than in 1988 with Disney, Westinghouse, and Microsoft bullying in on the news markets. The corporate interests of these companies need not, and probably do not, coincide with the public's interests, and, consequently, some news and some interpretations of news stories critical of business interests will probably not make it to press. Secondly, since advertising is crucial to keeping subscription costs low, media will shape their news away from serious investigative documentaries to more entertaining revues in order to keep viewer or reader interest and will cater to the audience to which the advertising is directed; before advertising became central to keeping a paper competitive, working class papers, for example, were much more prevalent, leading to a much broader range of interpretations of events (and thus more room for a reader to make up his own mind) than can be found by perusing the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. Thirdly, media depend crucially on sources and these sources will inescapably have their own agendas. Reliability of information should be important (although it may not be as shown by the tabloidization of the mass media in Monica Lewinsky affair), but the press also needs a steady stream of events to make into news. This leads to a reliance on the public relations bureaucracies of government and corporate agencies for whom some measure of accepted credibility exists and who will also probably have a statement about major happenings. However, by relying substantially on the statements these parties, the media becomes less an investigative body and more a megaphone for propaganda; independent confirmation of facts as well as interpretation eludes it. Fourthly, there are costs to producing an incendiary news item -- one which attacks powerful interests whether they be advertisers, government agencies, corporate bodies, or public interest groups. According to the previous three filters, the media relies on these interests for its survival and cannot afford their sustained censure. While none of these filters guarantee that a news item attacking one of these interested parties will not appear, the story is likely to be spun in a way to minimize fallout or flak which may compromise its integrity. Since they wrote at the end of the Reagan years, Herman and Chomsky's final filter is anti-communism, but it may be any prevailing ideology. The assumptions behind ideologies, almost by definition, are rarely challenged; ideologies organize the world, constructing frames into which news events can be placed for easy interpretation: Communism is evil; the domino effect is an actual phenomenon; America is right. This past February there was no hint in the domestic press that there could be any response to Iraq's intransigence other than bombing, making the contrary opinions of the vast majority of the world unintelligible. In domestic affairs, article after article praises various organizations on increasing the diversity of their membership -- diversity being always ethnic and racial diversity without ever asking why racial and ethnic diversity is necessarily relevant in the first place (as opposed to diversity of political opinion, for example). Mark Twain said, "It was a narrow escape. If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism." Manufacturing Consent asks us to challenge our assumptions about the way the world works, urges us to conscientiously separate the agendas behind the news we consume from the facts within, and demonstrates the danger of a monopolistic media cartel to purported American ideals of popular governance. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to break out of the flock and construct her own informed opinions about world affairs.
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Summary: The Anatomy of America's Propaganda Machine
Review: Edward Herman and Noam Chomksy's "Manufacturing Consent" is an alarming, disturbing, and finally brilliant exploration of the political-economic realities of American media. Armed with a solid hypothesis and reems of empirical data, the authors thoroughly debunk every myth that leads us to believe that American journalists and news reports are liberal, impartial, independent, or even remotely accurate in their presentation of "fact." Herman and Chomsky study the media the way that a biologist would study an organism; they apply scientific method and rigorous structural analysis to come up with theories, experiments, and conclusions. In the end, they expose the media for what it really is: an organ of state power through which the elite manipulate, control, and exploit the masses. If you're interested in unhooking your intellect from the American propaganda machinery, "Manufacturing Consent" is the place to start.
Rating: 
Summary: "[A]rguably the most important intellectual alive"
Review: A modern classic in political science, Manufacturing Consent does a thorough job presenting a case against journalistic objectivity. With a hefty amount of scholarship and clarity, Chomsky ("arguably the most important intellectual alive", according to the New York Times) and Herman illustrate the incentive structures of the mass media (their analysis was published before the popularization of the internet) and how such structures lead to collusion between the press and government. In other words, many of us are unwitting victims of government proganda aimed at maintaining the existing power structure. As much as it sounds like a conspiricy theory, don't dismiss it until you have read it. Chomsky and Herman present a compelling propaganda model that, while you may not agree with the conslusions completely, may give you further insight into the machinations of the democracy that we are all live in.
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Summary: Eye Opening
Review: Is the media free? According to this book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, it is far from free. They argue that the media in America serves to promote the agenda of the elite class in American society. In other words, the media only provide one-sided news coverage. Their main point is that while the misdeeds of enemy nations are widely criticized, the misdeeds of America and American client states are rarely publicized. It's sad when Americans wonder why they are hated by those in other countries. They wonder because they simply don't know what's going on in the world in the name of the American people. The press refuses to print it, not due to any direct control by the government, but because those who control the halls of power are a small elite, and the chiefs of media are a part of that small circle. They have the same boss--multinational corporations. Let's look at one the examples from the book--Central America in the 80's. During this period, the media spent a lot of time demonizing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Herman and Chomsky claim this focus was hypocritical considering the conditions in nearby El Salvador and Guatemala, both ruled by American-supported military governments. In these American client states, there were government-controlled death squads which terrorized and killed political opponents in a bloodbath beyond imagining. If you were going to start labelling terror states, these two states at the time would have been at the top of the list. However, the coverage of these atrocities was weak because it's easy to do business with a tightly-ontrolled military government. On the other hand, Nicaragua, with a type of communist government, was difficult to do business with, so we get lots of negative reports about Nicaragua even though the level of violence wasn't anywhere near the level of violence in the American client states, and if you didn't notice, the majority of violence against Nicaraguan citizens was committed by American backed Contras. So much for America's support of liberty and freedom across the globe. I guess the freedom that really matters is the freedom to grow cheap bananas for the world's supermarkets. As an American citizen myself, I'm worried about such media propoganda leading us down the wrong road. For example, if the media had bothered to do its job before the Iraq War, they would have done a little more investigation inot the Bush administration's bogus WMD claims and its close ties with the oil industry. We would have saved a lot of American and Iraqi lives. I recommend reading this book so that you can see what is really going on with the coverage of the American government's activities overseas. Don't let a few bad men ruin our international reputation.
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Summary: A tour de force
Review: A tour de force, co-authored by one of the world's leading experts on language and meaning.Â@In this book, Herman and Chomsky put forward a "propaganda model" to explain the bias in Western (mostly US) media on international affairs. Their thesis is that, although the US is not a dictatorship where a single leader can censor the press, the very market forces that lead people to believe in the freedom of their press actually work to create a self-imposed censorship which creates a biased media, more intent on delivering audiences to their advertisers and vital corporate sponsors than in providing their readers with balanced and informed news.Â@The authors back up their theory with a large number of examples, and focus on 3 main topics: Latin America, Vietnam and the attempt on the life of the Pope in 1981. Using extensive quotations from US contemporary media reports, and comparing them with official sources such as government documents, White House memos, State Department press releases, as well as reports in non-US-based media, Herman and Chomsky are able to bolster their thesis of a propaganda model, and show that US media reports are nearly always skewed to show the US and its allies as the "good guys", and other (enemy) states as the "bad guys". When "they" do it, it's called "terrorism", when "we" do it, it's called "fighting for democracy and freedom." Such a statement seems too blatantly simplistic to require serious consideration; nevertheless, the authors do give it very serious consideration, and the evidence they have scrupulously collected is hard to refute. Moreover, their propaganda model helps to explain why and how this can be so, even (indeed, particularly) in a "free democracy": a number of filters act to screen out unwelcome aspects of news. A startling eye-opener, very well researched and cogently, passionately argued. These authors care intensely about lives lost due to state-sponsored violence, whether that state is the US or the Soviet Union or anywhere else. A must-read for students of media and communication, and indeed any intelligent reader curious about the forces that shape what actually appears in their newspapers and television news.
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Summary: Too good to miss
Review:
The whole book tries to demonstrate how the mainstream media works within a propaganda framework, following the directrices from its government and only allowing criticism in very narrow grounds.
For the excercise on hand, they focus on three areas: Central America during the 80's , Indochina (Vietnam war) and the attempted murder of the Pope.
From these 3 cases, the Vietnam war is no doubt the most astonishing. Chomsky and Herman point out in the book (referring to the broad consensus in the media that the U.S. went there to do good when in fact the U.S army killed few million people for cynical reasons):
"We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary, far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system (...) Even more revealing with regard to Western intellectual culture is that the simple facts cannot be perceived, and their import lies far beyond the bounds of the thinkable"
... Have a read, it will not let you down.
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