Rating: 
Summary: manufacturing nonsense
Review: Chomskey and Herman focus too much on like "macro" reasons for manufacturing consent, like governments and capitalists who want people to do things. But he doesn't focus on "micro" reasons, like check this out: one time my friend John Loggins (we call him J.Lo for short) and I were hanging out on a thursday night. J.Lo said to me, "Let's go see Spiderman 2" and I said "Nah, I want to go to Subway instead and then I want to go to bed." So he was like "No, go to Spiderman 2 with me." So I said, "I don't want to J.Lo, I'm tired and I have to get up early in the morning." Then HE says "If you don't see Spiderman 2 with me I'm not going to hang out with you anymore." Where to turn, right? So I was like "fine, we'll go see Spiderman 2." So I'm watching Spiderman 2, and it was actually pretty good. When I came out J.Lo was like "aren't you glad you went?" and I was like "Yeah I am pretty glad i went. That wasn't a bad movie" - even though I didn't even want to go see it in the first place! Ok, so how would Chomsky explain why J.Lo manufactured consent to make me go and see Spiderman 2? I saw Chomsky speak earlier this year in Vancouver, and I yelled out in the crowd for him to answer this question but he just dodged it. Dodge this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Manufacturing Distortions
Review: Resurrecting Marcuse's theory of "repressive tolerance," Chomsky and Herman argue that America is not truly free because a capitalist media cabal indoctrinates the public on questions of foreign policy. Their evidence for this claim is somewhat limited: they ignore most national newspapers, nearly all magazines, all television channels, all wire services, radio news, talk radio, and nearly the whole of the Internet, including weblogs and webcasts. Furthermore, this book systematically distorts the historical record while manipulating facts, references, numbers and logic to promote an ideological agenda.
Consider the discussion of Vietnam. According to Chomsky and Herman, American intervention designed to prevent South Vietnam from being conquered by North Vietnam was morally equivalent to the Soviet invasions which conquered Eastern Europe and Afghanistan; thus resistance to totalitarian aggression is the same as totalitarian aggression (pp175-6, 184-5). Turning from questions of morality to issues of fact, they announce that the South Vietnamese government "had killed tens of thousands of people" by 1959 (p180). They offer no evidence, because the charge is untrue. On the other hand, they completely ignore the North Vietnamese terror, which resulted in 50,000-100,000 massacred and 300,000-500,000 starved to death during the same period (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4).
Chomsky and Herman also tell us that by 1965, "over 150,000 people" had been killed in South Vietnam according to "figures cited by Bernard Fall," which include "victims of the state terrorism of the US-installed regimes" (p183). Turning to their source, we find that this figure (actually 160,000) is not an estimate of civilian losses from Bernard Fall but an estimate of combat losses from Viet Cong propaganda (New Society, UK, April 22, 1965; Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, "The Vietnam Reader," p261). Meanwhile, they do not mention the very real communist atrocities: the death-squad murders of 37,000 civilians (Guenter Lewy, "America in Vietnam," p272); the slaughter of up to 155,000 refugees on the road to Tuy-Hoa (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors," pp318-9); the post-1975 massacre of up to 200,000 opponents (Al Santoli, "To Bear Any Burden," pp272, 292-3); the murder of 165,000 in concentration camps (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001); the mass expulsions which drowned as many as 250,000 boat people (San Diego Union, July 20, 1986); and so on.
On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman quietly abandon their earlier view that the Khmer Rouge had killed only 25,000, that its crimes had been inflated by "a factor of 100" and that Pol Pot's brutality had "saved many lives" ("After the Cataclysm," pp139, 160). Now they try to equate American bombing with communist genocide, arguing that "the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities" in Cambodia is "roughly in the same range" (pp264-5).
They generate this conclusion by a remarkable sleight of hand. First, they give estimates of 500,000-600,000 dead in the civil war (1970-5) (p263), more than twice the real figure (Marek Sliwinski, "Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique," pp42, 48). Second, they attribute the civil war deaths - all deaths, both military and civilian, on all sides - to American bombing (p260), in truth only a minor factor (Sliwinski, p43). Third, they reduce the toll of Khmer Rouge atrocities (1975-9) to 750,000-1 million (p263), only half of the actual number (Sliwinski, p57). Finally, they maintain that the starvation component of this toll "must be attributed to the conditions left by the US war" (p263), and not to the Khmer Rouge policy of enslaving the whole population while abolishing medicine and hospitals and rejecting food aid in the midst of famine. Doubtless unfairly, I am reminded of the techniques of Holocaust deniers, who exaggerate the cost of Allied bombing and then attribute Jewish deaths in the camps to starvation and disease caused by the war against the Nazis (see Deborah Lipstadt, "Denying the Holocaust," p186; Michael Sherman and Alex Grobman, "Denying History," p100).
Also of interest is the catalogue of misquotations and misrepresentations in this section:
(a) Discussing the civil war, Chomsky and Herman report that "[Francois] Ponchaud gives the figure of 800,000 killed," but "seems to have exaggerated the toll of the US bombing" and is "a highly unreliable source" (p383n31). In fact this exaggerated figure came not from Ponchaud but from Khmer Rouge propaganda which he quoted (Francois Ponchaud, "Cambodia Year Zero," p92).
(b) As evidence of "conditions left by the US war," they offer the desperate state of Phnom Penh in 1975 (pp263-4). But American bombing had ended two years earlier, and the city had been mercilessly shelled by the Khmer Rouge for months before it fell (John Barron and Anthony Paul, "Murder of a Gentle Land," pp1-3).
(c) They add that Nixon Administration sources "predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if US aid were to cease" (p264). The prediction actually referred to the likely death toll from the communist takeover (Far Eastern Economic Review, July 25, 1975).
(d) They also say that a CIA demographic study placed Khmer Rouge executions at 50,000-100,000, along with an estimate of total mortality that is "meaningless" (pp383-4n31). Concealed in this formulation is the fact that the execution figure referred only to a single purge, while the CIA's overall estimate of population decline under the Khmer Rouge was 1.2-1.8 million (CIA, "Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe," online).
The list goes on.
Next we are given the untenable analogy of Cambodia and East Timor (pp284-5, 301-3). With identical reasoning, Nazi apologists equate Auschwitz and Dresden. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered millions in Cambodia, while Indonesia killed tens of thousands in East Timor. Pol Pot murdered a quarter of his subjects, while Suharto killed less than one percent. There is no comparison between the two crimes. But these distortions are only the tip of the iceberg.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps Chomsky's best
Review: One of Chomsky's best if for no other reason than it is painstaking detailed, referrenced, and generally scholarly.
I believe nearly all of Chomsky's works are well thought out, well reasoned, and well written. He ties together events and history masterfully, often using little more than (as he's mentioned in at least one book) a high school intellect and a newspaper. That's all you need to understand the world.
Manufacturing Consent is one of his best both for the subject matter, for media control limits our ability to understand the nuances of the world around us and for it's presentation, it is, like I mentioned, more scholarly than most of his political work. It has a discernable thesis, it progresses by argument and example and does not suffer from some of the assumptions of prior knowledge that a few or his collected political essays do.
Overall a top choice for anyone. Couldn't give it 5/5 because, though generally well written, it is inexcusably dense and repetitive in places where it doesn't need to be.
Rating: 
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.
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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