If you think there's a huge, overwhelming right wing conspiracy out there, then this is the book for you. If you've a sceptical bone in your body, consider spending your money somewhere else. This book is one part theory, five parts anecdotal evidence judiciously selected by the authors in support of their theory. Anecdotal evidence has next to no intellectual value when used to support generalisations of the sort made by Messrs Herman and Chomsky.

In buying this book I was principally interested in Chomsky and Herman's arguments, which are set out in the first chapter and a half of the book. They are conveniently set out on page 2, and I can further summarise them:

Before being published, all news in America is run (consiously or subconsciously) through the following five "filters":

1: The size, concentrated ownership and profit orientation of the Mass Media: economic barriers to entry into the media market are high, the class of media organisations is small, concentrated and cross-owned, and all media owners are driven by profit: that is, they have to print something that will sell. A less conspiracy-laden rendering of that assertion is this: if you publish something the public think is a load of rubbish, you'll go bust.

2: Advertising as a main source of income for print media. Messrs Chomsky and Herman believe it isn't so much "what will sell" as "what is will be agreeble to advertisers" which is important. They clearly think these two concepts are substantially different, but they provide no arguments at all to support that conjecture, except a single (anecdotal) instance of the failure of an apparently widely read socialist worker's paper which, for all we know, could have gone bust for any number of reasons (for example, the arrival of another, better newspaper in the market, or that its readership began to think it was publishing a pile of rubbish).

3: The reliance of the media on information provided or sponsored by government, business and other "agents of power".

4: Public and official complaint on press content as a way of disciplining the media; and

5: Anti-communism as a national religion and control mechanism.

Filter 1 has been largely eroded by this wonderful thing called the internet that has evolved since Manufacturing Consent was written. Now anyone can publish; thanks to (er... multinational corporations like) Google, anyone's views (even mine!) can be readily accessed, for better of for worse. The profit motive remains, but I don't think that having to print what the public wants to read is especially insidious, especially given how much the US public likes poorly conceived conspiracy theories. Nor should Chomsky, since that's what's made him a global superstar!

Filters 2 and 4 are pretty unobjectionable, and wouldn't be news to anyone who spent more than a moment reflecting on what the media does in any community.

Filter 3 ignores "official sources" includes things like opposition political parties, competing businesses, public interest groups, consumer organisations, and dissident commentators of extraordinarily large pulling power like, well, Noam Chomsky.

Filter 5 is comical. No reason is advanced for why anti-communism should be thought of as any more of a filter - let alone a "national religion" than anti-nazism, anti-racism, anti-muslim fundamentalist, pro-NRA, pro-abortion etc etc.

The rest of the book comprises anecdotal evidence carefully selected by the authors to support their claims. As mentioned, I don't have much time for anecdotal evidence as a basis for making enormously sweeping generalisations, so I skipped them. Manfacturing Consent was a quick read, therefore.

My advice would be to skip the book altogether, in fact. ( )

http://www.chomsky.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Cho... ( )

This is an eye-opening critique of the American mass media. Chomsky asserts that media select what to mention and what not to mention in order to reflect the interests of what he calls the "buyer, the seller, and the product." In his propaganda model, the buyer is not the consumer, rather, the "buyer" is the advertiser who pays for the newspaper, and the mass media generally. The "seller" is of course the news organization itself. The "product" is the audience itself. The interests of these groups will be reflected, and anything repugnant to this view, sans a few exceptions, will be excluded somewhere along the way by the "filters." It is a true institutional analysis of the mass media, not a conspiracy theory about media bias. Whether the media are liberal or conservative, the media work within the "framework of assumptions" and favored doctrines. This framework is exemplified in his other works where he discusses how even the harshest liberal doves actually reinforce militarism and state power through their narrow, tactical criticism.

This is a must read. ( )

Rarely have I read something that so completely shifted my social paradigms. ( )

An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. ( )