Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Noam Chomsky is quite possibly the most intelligent man alive (this is being written after Stephen Hawking's death and noting that there are probably more intelligent women around but the media ignores them), and "Manufacturing Consent" covers his life and belief that the media is to blame for much of which ails the earth.

This is a well written polemic that points out times the mainstream media has twisted the truth or not covered at all. Of course, being a polemic means there is little nuance involved. Hermann and Chomsky are preaching to the converted, and while I agreed with them far more than disagreed, the preaching did grate after a while.

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. Whether or not you've seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.

If I were going to read another Bernie Sanders book, I’d buy it, but I decided to borrow Noam’s most famous book—ironically, his most famous book is co-authored with him listed second, although I can totally get him being a prince among rationalists, right….—Just, in case, right. (I’m a weird person.) I’ve listened to a bundle of his talks on YouTube, (sometimes I bundle things together with invisible string: and call it a book, right), and eventually, it left me feeling…. Mmm. I guess the secret could be a dual-problem: (a) listening to him talk, verbally, and, (b) while being a moderate, right. The first is to expose you to his unusually male, vaguely corpse-y voice/demeanor; the second leads to a lot of: “…. I show more have no idea how to make a decision about that”, right. (smiles) The man of letters doesn’t like to make decisions, right. I also didn’t like the idea of a corpse-male guru, right: I read a lot of Jane Austen: you know. Didn’t have a girlfriend….

I get it. I was a freak.

The media is an interesting topic of conversation, right. There are structural limits to the stories we tell—like it almost would have been, if not quite illegal, Against the Rules, for Jane Austen not to be a traitor to her gender, in the 1810s, even if after a number of decades, people eventually came to appreciate her intelligence, her almost mechanical wit: as though she could repair carriages, almost, although the carriages were more like…. (chuckles). Anyway: but yeah, to get a book in print—and keep it in print…. You know, someone has to decide it’s not against The Rules, right; and there are different sorts of rules, for different sorts of…. Classes, I guess you could say. I guess I don’t think of a “class of people” as being purely economic, although both occupation and income are big pieces, right: and it’s not only a matter of…. Face discrimination, of the two major kinds, as much as that’s a part of this…. Machine, we’re told we’ve built, right.

Of course, being a (non-theory-of-language) Noam Chomsky book, it’s largely about global politics: the USA’s attempt to shape and dominate the world. It is true that that is a better way to—I mean, radical politics is almost the only light of day certain whole countries see, in the Western matrix of information, right. A purely romantic book might have minority (secondary, usually) characters if it’s in London or New York; occasionally you get a Zadie Smith, right…. But it’s uncommon, you know.

Noam does like to talk about the—what was it Graham Greene called it? (I have no idea when I read that stuff)— the torturable part of the world, right…. And maybe there’s a little bit more of the American ghetto in that category than you’d sometimes think from reading Noam—the ghetto is “a place both Black and hopeless (or so they say)” as Michelle Obama once commented in her first (audio)book: although I get that Barack Obama’s policies were probably constructed to a large degree with an eye to not getting assassinated, right, (his wife tells some weird stories: this is a weird country)~ and I’m sure that someone like Noam finds that rather irritating, right….

But yeah: whole countries don’t exist for us: largely the ones that white people conquered and burned and then left and forgot about, right…. And those countries kinda disappear from the media.

So yeah, there’s definitely a whole sort of gendered-disposition hierarchy going on, in terms of talking about international news, vs. many of the other aspects of life: but yeah, plenty of people have the same gendered-disposition stance, and talk about “the world” in order to make the non-colonized parts of it…. Just kinda, disappear, right.

And I get that sometimes you have to make a decision, as to what you think, right. It’s not just a matter of, “knowing”, in a way…. Divorced from a certain sort of struggle, right. (shrugs) I mean, I’m not the type to bludgeon people into unconsciousness with blunt objects any more than Noam is, right…. But that’s very, very far from being the only proscribed action, or the only thing that, in laypeople’s terms, “pisses people off”, so to speak. (Which people, I wonder?)….

…. “Selection (of personnel)…. Internalization (by personnel)”

You kinda send the message somehow that certain things are done in a certain way and other things aren’t talked about: and then you consider it proper to pick people who play the game—and then act out that…. ‘propriety’, no.

…. And that other parts of society—like education: credentialization, basically, work the same way: select/internalize….

I guess it sounds terribly non-leftist/populist to wonder if the general populace isn’t bravely resisting, right, but sometimes I wonder about those curious morons, the average people, right. Commercialization is another supporting factor: and it is largely a matter of simplification, which dovetails elite interests with popular…. Diseases, almost. I do think that some academicization of things isn’t helpful, but the average person tends to just drop complexity like a hot potato. Of course, they’ve also been discouraged from thinking well, in many cases, (and sometimes given less means to get information: although internalization always plays a major role, for most people: internalization of contempt), or else you’re trained to think of yourself as an elite, which can degrade your sense of compassion: to put it, VERY, politely, right….

…. And dissent exists, but it’s kept at the margins. Not overtly punished, just…. Made a burden, in a certain sort of way. If you make it enough of a burden, it’s not a problem.

It does sound very different from a book I would write, if I were a book-writer—kinda technical, focused, right: very specific in its field of inquiry…. But I might agree with a lot of it.

…. It’s a little dry and abstract. I realize not everything is a narrative—not Noam Chomsky, right—but I wish it was written so that I could construct myself this narrative, like, “I’m Sandy Smith: and these are the nine barriers/system tests that all media creators have to pass before their idea gets to the public, and which serves to destroy or at least marginalize ‘radical’ ideas….” That’s not what you get from the text. I’m not sure what to do with there being only ten or thirty media companies that “matter”, so to speak. How many should there be?…. Really, it seems that if half or a third did business in a radically different way from the rest, that would be significant. The lack of real choice seems to largely stem from their all being ideological clones of each other, right. If like nine identical twins rule the world, and they all plot to murder one of the twins, or else they let in their fucking twenty identical cousins, right…. I mean, does it matter? Is this the level that the problem is on, right?…. I don’t mean to play down the level of collective choice…. But there being a collective choice for clone-choices, seems to precede the fine print in the contract—right?….

…. “…. the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary political controversy”

That’s a thing.

Even today, it’s like: people can scream if they’re not important—or if they’re Trump, lol. But the mark of the “polite, respectable” person, is to avoid and defang: the populace, ideas: everything….

…. I guess I knew that the South Vietnamese government was loyal to Washington and not to the Vietnamese people in the territory it controlled—although I didn’t like to think about it. I didn’t realize that 17% of the Vietnamese population died in that war—plus millions wounded, the chemical warfare and bombing/property damage, etc. It’s hard to think of another war that killed 17% of a country’s total population, except for the American wars against the Natives of this continent, and of course some of the big name tyrants of 20th century Europe—unpleasant people, right.

America exists; America’s enemies don’t exist—they have no inherent morality unless we give it to them, right. Therefore, we’re right…. What a crazy country, we are…. Patriots in this country always frighten me: they always look like they want to punch you in the gut…. And I’m an American, you know: and I “look like one”, (wink).

Scary.

…. America is a genocidal state—I read that book about what we did to the Native nations, and in retrospect it was my own community I was learning about which is oddly wholesome: although one book is never enough, generally—she got to the end and she was like, ‘It’s like Vietnam’, and I was like: no, Vietnam must have been different…. But yeah, contrary to the example of the shit-posters on the internet, (not that there isn’t good content online, of course)—it is possible to shit-post even about the truth, right…. I find myself less angry at Americans, (although some participate more fully in our collective insanity, others are…. Less fully into it, in one of several ways, right: not always in the most fully disengaged ways possible, right)—individual Americans, since I figured out that we are basically a genocidal collective, right. When you’re told X and X doesn’t fit: when people are acting crazy, and it doesn’t fit the model; when you feel like you have to meld/deal emotionally—no choice/engage loyally with an idea or individual, and it’s acting crazy and you can’t see the reason…. It just leads to rage, right. (A lot of that classic 60s rage came from understanding basically nothing about the world: all they knew was that yesterday they were loyal slaves: and today, the chains hurt, right?) But when it fits a pattern, right…. Although the other side of it is…. You find yourself saying, ‘XYZ is bullshit. Stay observant and alert for possibilities.’ Instead of ‘XYZ is bullshit…. Gotta stick with it, though…. Man, where is this, rage, coming from, yeah?’

Both sides are really equally important.

…. But yeah: maybe I could write a novel, “Romance in a Genocidal State”, right. Though I actually can’t write novels…. I could get a girlfriend: feed her these titles; then have her do all the work, and offer no further assistance, right. (shrugs) Or, I could cook for her, right. So many possibilities….

…. “An estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam’s land was subjected to chemical attacks…. A 1967 study…. concluded that U.S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3.8 million acres of arable land…. it ‘first and overwhelmingly affected small children.’”

In the Bush II years, in high school, one of my history teachers, who often presented himself as a hard leftist, right, when discussing the Vietnam War, said that “they”—you know, I forget his exact words: they’d sacrifice themselves in droves, you know~ real power players stuff, but he made them sound profoundly, evil, right: totally Other/malicious, right: “they’d (do anything, whatever he says) to take a single American life”, right.

And it’s funny: because a lot of it was leftist. The legal case for war was B.S., the political idea that if we lose Vietnam, then Vietnam, the super-power, goes on to dominate the world for 1,000 years, that was B.S., (I mean: you almost have to laugh, right: if the empire doesn’t control a single country: we have to commit mass suicide, right)…. The assistant teacher—the “student teacher”—told us when he asked him, how after the war Vietnam built its economy and became stable and prosperous, right….

But there was that little trap door in the American mind, right—our beautiful progressive-hard-left mind, right: the bugs were after us. They wanted to kill us. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to destroy….

And the primary responsibility isn’t on the men holding guns, the small numbers of active combat troops from the USA who held guns and killed the enemy—a third would die, a third would be wounded, and a third would be unwounded, and then they’d unload another cattle car of, meat, basically: and do it again…. And all that money spent on the war: they were utterly indifferent, the people who decided, that the food was shit, and that (literal insect) bugs ate them alive; and they didn’t care what chances the meat off the cattle cars had of surviving, right…. But yeah: while they were in-Indian-country: their job was to kill, to destroy: absolutely everything, right. What could be annihilated from the air, or from far away, was just leveled, like that, right: and then you sent in the angry frightened men with guns, and they just killed everything that moved, and everything that wasn’t alive, they burned, right.

One time, that high school history teacher of mine—and I was in the best history classes, in particular, in that school, right: and I don’t think it was an inferior school—one time, he had a real flip-out: and pointed at each of us white boys, and said “white boy” as he pointed at us—there were maybe six or seven of us, out of twenty-odd kids, right; it was a largely Indian-American school district, and girls are given an incredible illusion of success in school: because they sit down, shut up, and follow directions, right—so they are more likely to end up in superior classes, right…. But yeah: then he’s like, telling us how we’d better, do well, or whatever, since it would be harder for us, trying to get into a good college, right.

(chuckles) Well, we all have a struggle, right. Some people have their children starved to death, because they were projected to vote the wrong way. And other people, deserve everything: but face stiff competition from lesser breeds, right.

It’s hard, living this life, you know. At the risk of sounding insincere…. On a round planet: there’s no choosing sides, right. (And my apologies to Wayne Dyer: he doesn’t deserve this shit, but, yeah…. I don’t know…. I just, don’t, know….).

…. And you know—what I should have done, was stormed right out of the classroom to file a complaint with the principal, so that he could suffer the maximum embarrassment possible before getting away with his little temper tantrum, basically: what we all actually did was~ I mean, he divides us into groups, to talk about coursework, and we all just kinda took a few moments to kinda process, in the sense of: wow—not polite, right…. But yeah—that’s like what a hero would do, right, an actual moral entity: to throw a rock at the tank, in effect; I can’t describe it…. not like a…. That’s the funny thing: they did mention My Lai, right…. We never got the sense that, like the anti-Semites of a few decades before, the anti-Asian hate squads were indeed following orders: it was either that, or end up in military prison, right: a traitor to the nation, the conservative churches and newspapers frothing for your blood—the whole nine yards….

But yeah: protesting racist patriarchy grooming or whatever, is hero stuff, when the authority sets that up, right—and I wasn’t born twice-born, right; I was born once-born: I’d never learned from a life before this one, right…. And if society is evil, and you’ve never grown up before, basically…. If you’re lucky enough to get on the freedom train: you’ll bang yourself up, and you’ll miss a few stops, and you’ll get all sweaty and weird before you figure anything out: because most people start with nothing, right, when it comes to…. I mean, almost anything, right…. And people thought I was smart as I kid; and I believed it, right. Set-up No. 1; Mistake No. 1, right?….

I mean, 13% of a whole country’s land subjected to chemical attacks: including much of the rice-land, right? In WWI massed troops formations concentrated in very small areas of land were subjected to chemical attacks, and people said, Never again, right?…. Never again…. Just Kidding Edition, right.

And we have the chutzpah to feel sorry for ourselves, because people, what? What happens to white male Americans as a group, that we should feel sorry for ourselves as a group, right? People criticize our French language abilities, or something? Grow a testicle, right. Do research.

Honest to fuck….

…. Some radical Christians do sometimes criticize American genocide in our wars, right: but the general pattern is very church-y, right—post-18th-century, saying things doesn’t result in death for US/Western citizens, but the pattern is: we are the church; we are right—we say we are right, and we are…. People generally allow that we are the church because of how right we are: this agreement constitutes reality, and renders discussion not just an ineffective use of time and unnecessary but harmful, offensive, unjust, disloyal—impolite and offensive, like drawing testicles, or something, right. And you can see how wise we’ve become, by not shooting people who point out that we murder for our side, right: and yet, some people don’t take the hint, don’t understand the agreement, right, and actually DO those things we allow them to do: so that they WON’T, right….

So yeah: don’t draw testicles and don’t criticize the violence of our own side. You’re my son: don’t embarrass me, or impugn my ability to train, right.

…. So Nixon bombs Laos because it’s vaguely near a country he wants to take over, and destroys over 300 villages and kills tens of thousands of civilians, because—why not?…. Who will tell me no, right? It would be disloyal to question our own violence, right…. But he breaks into the Democratic Big Wig Convention, right: breaks locks, violates privacy: the media flips out, right. The American elite exists: regardless of whether it votes for Nixon. He broke the rules.

But you want to dispatch the Asian hate squads to Laos, right…. You’re only killing people, who don’t exist for us, right?

…. There are obviously villains in the world who aren’t America: but we (I suppose we as the populace control the government?) choose which ones to attack and which ones to encourage, and aid, basically—based on nothing but our own whims, and perceived benefits and power play plans, right….

And to be honest, it doesn’t bother people, right. This is America: and as an American, you don’t sit up at night, worried that somebody got shot in Indonesia somewhere, right. America is magical—sometimes…. Paris, maybe, could be magical. These little Asian countries, right…. Mmm. (meme) (1) Yes, very sad. (2) Anyway….

…. The new rules of trade in the 90s favored the U.S. investor class, but not the populations of the U.S. and—especially not—Mexico, right: and people protested that, and the media laughed, and quoted the title of a Shakespeare play…. Like they were children, right….

…. And the police ignored the vandal protestors: that was useful—they probably called the journalists in, right.

The people just trying to exercise their right to be heard without being attacking, in the Leader of the Free World Land, right…. The sheriff is in town, and he shoots first, asks questions, you know…. Well, we get around to that, sometimes….

America is violence, you know. We took the lands by violence; we rule them by violence, right?

…. And obviously, we are indifferent to whether our science is harmful to Nature, right. We are curious about whether our science gets us paid; whether it destroys the basis for life, hmm, well: an American can’t be an idealist—you know?

…. A “guided market system”

I call it, “this capitalism”.

…. Systematically marginalizing but not criminalizing dissent, “far more credible and effective” for the empire, than straight censorship

…. And yeah: I don’t like that my country does this, you know. I don’t like that the same government that helps me buy peanut butter because I’m poor—as much as they don’t do many things for me and people like me, or worse off than me, right: I do still have a life here, of course—also murders people and lies about it, right. Let not the peanut butter distribution hand know what the murder the untouchables hand is doing, right…. Which even matters more, at the end of the day, right? Which enterprise is the front, you know, and which is the prime slice of the action, right?….

…. Maybe I shouldn’t say this—I know he’s not going to address this in the book, but it does seem like, in the context of the larger American culture/project of conquest, right: the behavior/culture of a certain portion of the Black population, that we all pretend to wring our hands about, right: at least we pretend not to know where it comes from, that is—ghetto gangsterism, right: the sorta Black cowboy without a hat, right—it’s like, well, our culture is about having an empire, and so they want one, but they can’t be part of the main act, right: so they basically prey, mostly on each other, right—the little Black ghetto gangster sub-mini-empires, kinda prey on each other, and try to colonize each other: essentially without success, right, in every aspect except for style/respect one, right~ from some classes of the population, since they certainly are American, no doubt….

Because empire itself is not American in origin, but a certain sort of stance towards empire is our American heritage, even if the actual operation of the power structure that actually organizes most of the money and violence isn’t actually borne equally by all subsets of the population, right…. But yeah: the internalization of the values is intense, right—it’s really wild….

…. And it’s a tough issue, because society shouldn’t lie to people: people shouldn’t train you to be pro-genocide, and then leave to just figure out that genocide is wrong and detox from propaganda usually more by yourself than with any sort of support, right. That’s not proper. But sometimes Bernie or Chomsky make it sound like the elite is running wild against the determined opposition of the population to genocide, right: I mean, if you formally, kindly and calmly ask if they like genocide in a poll, and 76% of people say, don’t murder the children, right: but then it takes ten seconds of lies to make the children out to be green-skinned trolls, and it’s either kill them or be shoved into last place, right: now opposition to genocide is 34%; the policies are put in place, and 90% of the 34% shrug off their policy defeat, and continue on their merry way, with their football games and their gossip and their online shit-posting, right—that suggests a much, much more flimsy opposition to tyranny than, the 1% with the aid of like, the 24%, right….

…. “Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective (just as they claim to be with “complete integrity and goodwill”); the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.”

…. The ‘filters’ are very abstractly described, and some important filters are left out. However, to take the issue of commercialism, obviously perhaps the most important issue for him: it does dovetail with things he doesn’t discuss as much, very often, right: the higher up you go in the economic pyramid, the more likely is it is to be middle-of-road, conformist white men, trad rich, old money, you know: so the intense commercialization and concentration of wealth-power isn’t only a class issue, right.

Also, while in many if not most instances, I find that profit itself, abstracted from the nature and I guess you could say the truthfulness of the company—its integrity—isn’t very insightful: just to know, $1.2 billion in assets doesn’t tell me much; however, I think it is kinda a question whether the profit motive is as trustworthy in dealing with information as it is in say, selling restaurant food, or something like that. People most skilled in informing for the purposes of technicality, strict truth, fairness, things like that, usually aren’t the best at making people feel cozy, appreciated, valued, so to speak—and vice versa. It does seem like if there’s no limit placed on the commercializing impulse by the justice impulse, balance won’t be achieved; there won’t be a felt need for true quality, in any sense. You end up with all the power in the hand of conformist trad rich white men who don’t much value either honesty or appreciation, and who hide behind figureheads whom they control, right….

A lot is either left unsaid it communicated in a very wooden sort of way, right; I can’t describe it. But what is here, is very suggestive.

…. It’s like, they just don’t seem interested in a(n) (at least potentially) legitimate, honest-commercial role in society—in honest interaction with other aspects of society/viewpoints/central values, such as justice-centric rather than commerce/enjoyment-centric (which isn’t to say that weeping saints crying about justice, “justice on the march” so to speak, doesn’t also need to be balanced—although that’s what we’re obsessed about, right: other societies’ problems!), or in communities with less historical wealth and who would benefit from a wealth pyramid with less wealth centralized at the extreme top, right.

There’s not a sense of I can have this, you can have that, right. It’s more like: anybody who can have anything worth having, has to be a clone of the Most Important People, you know. Don’t look different; don’t think different. Don’t have different…. In the abstract: it does sound oddly like a communist dictatorship, right?…. I guess, you hate something enough, unreasonably enough, no matter how bad it is, right: eventually, that’s what you turn into, right….

…. Advertisers want “audiences with buying power, not audiences per se”

The different filters he talks about are really different sides of the same issue, you know; but it’s curious…. It’s like: the consensus values are that you want power so that you can have more power to get more power with, right—I know making fun of commies and the woo-woo crowd are both equally easy, pretty much: but it’s like, you’re not supposed to want power, FOR, something, right—you’re not supposed to want it, for serving the public interest, the national (international! 🤪) community—I guess you could say that, but it would have to be code for the West End of London plus NYC’s Upper East Side, etc., etc…. It’s not supposed to be for promoting values, character, dharma, love: you’re supposed to maybe pretend—but you’re expected to lie, and you’re punished if you believe it, or are different from any other company culture at all, almost…. You’re supposed to want power for the purposes of gaining power, you know.

Which is ironically almost exactly what they say about witches in the anti-Wicca horror movies, right. They want to set and achieve goals; they want happiness and agency; they don’t aspire to be weeping saints…. (gasp!) They want power for the sake of power!

~At a certain point, lying does become like a…. Mental illness, basically….

…. And when media sponsors decide to be “good”, they go for nostalgia, usually; perhaps far away or long ago/Wholly Other, right: you get the education/aristocrat snobs: ~and not only that~, you keep people away from possibly “disruptive” choices they can make in the here and now, right; I hadn’t thought of that…. I saw that kind of elitism only through the educational neurosis lens; and that’s part of it: but there’s another part, too….

…. I don’t always know how to approach or weave in my own personal experiences, believe it or not—asking a librarian for help finding a book (this one: I keep transposing the Dewey numbers in my mind), vs. not asking for help finding the CDs of basically the biggest baroque pop band in the whole history of forever: baroque pop, stadium version, right (it was embarrassing, and mental illness = shame, right: this was ten years ago); or going into the forest to meditate and observing a mother deer and her child, right: I could easily expand on both of those experiences—especially the latter is hard to explain rationally, although I know what it meant to me—and it’s like…. Not all rich people are equally neurotic, but the rich-person-system is very neurotic, right. I don’t know what it is about being rich that would make you not value things like that, things like nature and relationships, (of course, some do, but they’re not the most ~important~ trend-setters, you know: they’re odd enough to get in newspapers, and not as the leaders of $2 trillion companies, and they’re not the generic boss, right), you know: like, whatever part of having fewer limits to your expression makes you want to be indifferent to the future of planet Earth, and to almost prefer bullying to healthy business relationships, even when it ensures you’ll never be liked better than any generic competitor, essentially, right? Really the sense of despair and alienation and the pointlessness of life came first: then the acting-out, almost: you buy up television stations, not because you give a damn about television, but because that’s “the thing to do” in your social set, almost, right? Not that if somebody from your social set were to fall off his yacht and drown, it would be a problem, right: quite the contrary, right. Maybe in some cases it wouldn’t be as extreme as that, sometimes: but for us, the purpose of power is power, right. You buy television because it’s power: not because it’s television. The sense of despair, alienation, and the senselessness of life preceded all your practical decisions, right.

(smiles) I realize Marx wouldn’t agree with that: but I do give Marx credit for seeing that 19th century sentimentalism: parlor game romances and weeping saints and mothers and so on, were extremely precious in pretending that power relations, don’t exist, in effect, right. I guess you could say that Marx was a stage in a Hegelian process: which is in turn a reflection of the generic myth of the dying god: although that myth guides some astrological ages and not others. The guiding myth of an age itself changes in a sort of Hegelian process. Of course the literal man Hegel grossly overestimated his own importance, you know. History is a wheel: no one of us can stop it, nor does it stop for any one of us, right: not even German philosophers, believe it or not….

Anyway.

…. The authors’ references to religion are brief but rather curious, right. They seem to highlight both radical Christianity’s ability to critique, and the great bulk of Christianity’s ability to sacralize—in very many people’s minds, right—the bloody-minded system, right. Of course, even with radical Christianity, right: radicalism (to the barricades, my brothers!! We won’t return to work at Barnes & Noble until there’s socialism! And no romance novels—ever again!), plus Christianity (omfg 😹), can create a real cluster-fuck, right: think of Walter Brueggemann, right: I’m pretty sure one of his books was called, “A Way Other Than Your Own, You Cheap, Stupid Little, ~Girl~: A Christian Man’s Ethic….”

~But yeah: I mean, if the issue is dropping bombs on refugee camps, right; state terrorism of US client states, and/or the USAF, etc., right…. There’s such a thing as being too combative with a potential ally: and I don’t want that stance to be mine, right.

Because yeah: I’m not a Christian; and I don’t like Christianity—to be honest, I wish it didn’t exist. But that’s not an action plan, obviously—that’s just idle, impractical B.S.ing in my heart of hearts, right. It remains that Christians do NOT all “imagine only evil continually”, as the god-of-Noah’s-flood, apparently opined of humanity in general, right….

…. Only a “safe” liberal (maybe) if you have impeccable anti-radical credentials; “this was taking democracy and pluralism too far”, etc.

Yeah. Too seriously, right. You have to keep a certain lightness in it—the amusing irony of ideals no one believes in, or expects anyone else to believe in, juxtaposed with crushing punishment on anything that threatens the system…. (tastes) Add a little garlic; a little salt…. (tastes) (nods).

Right?

…. “…. the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: ‘Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.’”

…. To be a friend is to be absolved of all moral responsibilities: this is our curious gift, no?

…. “While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life.”….

It is funny how all you really have to do to be killed by the system is to be an American Christian who visits one of the client states in order to share the ties of common religion or humanity, right…. And they hush that up, the newspapers: and it’s like, they think that they’re pulling a fast one on you—and they also think that they’re being “good”, right….

…. This is from a while ago, but the quote given about the suddenly-relevant (and that is a curious idea, right: (cartoon British inventor grandfather:) so many possibilities….!) ex-Stalinists that the big company news broadcasts loved to quote: the idea that they were like people ‘disappointed in love’, and what I would call their mental-emotional patterns, hadn’t changed…. In a sense of ‘fact’, it seems accurate, but I wonder if it wasn’t done in a callous way. He doesn’t talk much about love: and the person ‘disappointed in love’ is a fool-enemy, right. Of course, whole books could be written about the delusions of love, right, (although that’s not what they did, right)…. Arguably, the implication is that wise men don’t fall in love, right.

But yeah: to be a loyal American citizen, you have to fall in love with, races, right—peoples. Write love poetry for Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, the frenzied letters from fascist-harried Central America go right in the garbage, right. Like quite a quixotic lover, right: only in love with the good they cannot effect, right?

…. ~Jimmy Carter~ wanted to shut up Oscar Romero, right. O.R.: the military shouldn’t murder our people, just because we aren’t American citizens, and don’t have as much value, like them, right. ~Jimmy “Didn’t We Assassinate Him Yet? He Destroys the Constitution just by Closing His Eyes and Recalling Something He Read in a Book One time” Carter, kinda mops the anxiety sweat off his face, curses, right….

Wow. What kind of a place is this. Right? And if you brought it up to the average American, it would indeed be like: Hey, El Salvador freaks don’t have rights: they’re not citizens. Stop embarrassing me. Stop embarrassing our country. This is America…. This, ~whole galaxy~, right….

Gaea!

…. I wonder what life insurance rates are like in a “fledgling democracy”, right.

…. “To this day the media maintain the central myth of earlier years, long after having conceded quietly that it was a complete fabrication.”

It’s sad, because there are ~some~ Christians like Romero, but this sounds like the history of the church in one sentence, right. “Yes, that was all a lie, designed to make you weak and vicious, which we felt we had to do, to ease our own crippling insecurities. Things will be different now: I swear on Jesus. Well, anyway, as I was saying, (repeats basically the exact same goddamn lie as before.)”

…. “…. but there is no indication that it ascertained this (that senior leaders did not order the American nuns killed) by any route beyond asking the authorities whether they were involved.”

I wish that weren’t funny. Omg.

…. Because they were American, they got special treatment: reluctant half-justice, right: “It took three-and-half-years for justice to triumph in this one case, with a lid still kept on top-level involvement…. (the media presented the case) in such a way as to keep indignation low and to downplay the quality of a system that murdered the women had to be ~forced~ to find a set of low-level personnel guilty of the crime (which it took them years to do).”

Can’t let the common imperial lemming know that they’re not really that important, right?

…. (Guatemala) The official U.S. government press releases do sound like—I was going to say the worst of the Christian church propaganda, although, yeah: like the Christian-left church propaganda, you know: “I can see now that up until now, we’ve supported evil: this is the first day of the rest of my life”—and then off to the bar for a bender, right….

Lapses in morality are bad when they make social control difficult, right….

…. And, yes:

(CIA agents as Mexican cowboys, gringo/wannabe version, doing song and dance) The capitalist revolution has begun!

…. And yes, since we can’t allow Nicaragua to conquer the United States, we are entitled to lie about them. We’re only trying to protect ourselves from terrorists. Why, are you a terrorist? Are you their spy?

…. (laboriously proves in prose that the USA did a bad thing by arranging to have people killed in El Salvador and Guatemala, and in badmouthing the people in Nicaragua who have the nerve not to wear a wire to connect them to DC, right)
(you dad) (waves his hands with great contempt, angry that he has to waste even ten seconds of his life dismissing your crazy concern for other people’s so-called rights) Yeah? Well you wanna know what I think? I think that ~Hitler~ did a bad thing: and ~Hitler~, was a ~foreigner~. (beat) He was a gangster!

~It’s like, people will believe that the American client state is good and the independent state is bad, because most of these people have difficulty that the Latino is a standup guy, even AFTER you put him on the payroll—right?

That the universe should be run by rich gringos, and that the spics should shut up and listen, is literally the liberal position, right. (And realistically, some of them have to be killed. 🤫 Don’t brag about it….)

…. —(dreamy look) The Bulgarian-Soviet trained Turkish guy decided to strike against European political romanticism, sorry, NATO, by trying to kill the pope: to show that Islamic Turkey could never be a true ally.
—(sternly) Some of our people might believe that: whereas in reality, they’re loyal guns.
—(startled) Sorry; I’ll think of something else.
—(no less sternly) See to it, that you do.

It’s just wild…. Right-wing woke, you know. My feet need not touch the floor: everything I deplore—I am that; and more….

…. I have to say, the real-world CIA/right-wing/Western intelligence organizations make Tom Clancy and even Robert Ludlum seem like pretty crazy crackers, you know. Clancy seemed almost to advertise his craziness, of course—he seemed like he should have spent more time flipping bar burgers, and less time posing as a world-spy-expert, right: it was just obviously just spiteful shit, you know. But one wants to make excuses for one’s countrymen—(Republican on TV) We call it patriotism, boy—and decades later, it seemed easy to laugh it off, right: (slaps table, laughing) Those quasi-fascist commie-hunters are up to their old tricks again: gosh; they actually considered this shit, ~plausible~! 😹

~And yet they were really in earnest about it: they may have put down phony bills on the craps table, but they had their one hand on their “concealed” weapon, right….

Jason Bourne Man seems less obviously a wannabe-fascist, right—and I did already buy from the library media dump sale, the Matt Damon movie named after and apparently loosely based on the book: movies are such crap; and Matt Damon is handsome; I’ll still watch it…. [Update: I won’t.] But yeah, in retrospect, despite wanting to be “fun” and having read some romantic novels of similar quality: I really “should” have been more turned off by the notable man-power (ie Man Liberation, right 🎃), aspects of the book, right…. Guilty, right: what more can you say…. But yeah, although RL is like 50-75% as paranoid of Washington as any other government—like many rank-and-file “American patriots”, it’s true: if less, you know, Certified CIA Asset Agitprop, (CCIAAA, lol…. Wow, that’s funny: you know, AAA fucked me over one time, incidentally, right: the mechanics’ culture, you know: men don’t answer to anyone, except their battle-brothers, right…. The instant you stop being a money-supplier in good standing, you get targeted by the battle-brothers…. “Business-relationship fence-mending” is a foreign, Russian Marxist strategy, clearly outlawed in the Constitution of American Folk Customs, right…. But yeah: I thought that I could play nice with Jason Bourne: so I guess I had it coming, right….)….

But yeah: even Robert Ludlum, to say nothing of CIA-asset spy fiction writers, right, would have approved of the whole “maybe Russians buy assassinations on the international terror market, right”: and it just leads to…. Just literally the most implausible lies, right: just making things up, out of whole cloth…. Just casually and stupidly lying, for one’s own benefit, without taking the trouble not to insult other people’s intelligence, right….

Maybe I should stick to “Star Wars”, things like that, right? WOW….

~Yeah: one trusts people; and then one finds out what they are like, right. One ends up feeling…. Implicated, right. (stereotypical interrogation scene) Are these your fellow men? Are you part of their organization, the Man Adventure Network (MAN)? (silence) We have evidence linking you to them, and them to theft, murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. If you’re willing to cooperate, we’d be willing to knock down the charges on you to ‘useful idiot for fascist movement’…. I suggest you make the right choice. (decides to idly flick the lamp guard on the lamp hanging from the ceiling, and it careens about a little)….

~Phew. Wow….

~~But yeah: I hate finding things out, right?…. I want to find out what I already knew, not that I was a fucking dick, right….

…. People would literally say that writing favorably about anti-apartheid activists was the same as being pro-KGB terrorism: and when that resulted in being tried and found guilty of slander, the New York Times would gush it up: because this person was a key “we are not pro-radical; we are pro-system; anything the CIA says, goes, on our book” source, right.

…. Imagine if I were to like shoot the head baker in Paris, and that caused a rift in NATO between the USA and France, right. (laughs) Ah…. shit. (shakes head) “These people are watching the normie news; they’ll swallow it.”

…. But yeah: it’s funny how you can like take, “proof that it’s a propaganda system”, and turn it into: “being loyal”, “being an American”, or even, “being a moderate”, right. Like, “being sane”, basically. “Having friends”….

…. And yeah: propaganda was never a factor in any previous war—until one didn’t work out quite right, (although a 30 to 1 kill ratio suggests that we may have more or less survived with our nation intact, right): if we lose a war, it’s because the Ministry of Information dropped the ball, right. (Such an interesting assumption, in so many ways.) In the past: the world was simpler, purer. Girls got married younger, and had fewer rights. And men on the battlefield, were never stabbed in back by the J—sorry, by the Press. By the Jitterbug Press, right….

It seems so credulous, just on the face of it, once you realize the system itself is aggressive and deceitful, it seems like the whole stab-in-the-back thesis seems like the product of Stans, right…. It is only by agreeing to put the foreign policy of the USA as more or less fundamentally off the table for discussion, right, that the Vietnam invasion seems to be anything other than a great crime, you know…. People make no mistake that they wish they could do violence of one sort or another to you, just for your considering your nation’s foreign policy to be something you should have a right to have some opinion on, rather than that we are the loyal slaves of our masters, or else hell-bound, right…. Like, how else do you defend such mendacious and destruction lying, except with the veiled or unveiled threat, right—with taboo?…. You’d think if they had some sort of argument, and indeed, some kind of respect for you as a “fellow citizen”—DO Americans ever see their neighbors as fellow citizens? They almost never do, and being a patriot makes it less likely; we are only fellow citizens if we are both part of some common club, right. ~The movie Gettysburg: Say we are part of a club: a gentlemen’s club…. And now they are saying, that we can’t leave, that club! ~God, imagine if a teen today described civil society as a “club”, right…. But, that’s what it is, right…. To be kind, you know….

But yeah, you reason and try to discern the feelings of people you respect, and when you have an actual line of reasoning to deploy.

But when you’re an American patriot…. Mmm. “(Moronic slogan delivered with great arrogance and aggression!)” “(people who equivocate and give most of the ground up without a fight, because they’re intimidated imperial lemmings, right)”.

…. “Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected in the media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an ‘adversarial stance’ with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from the elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways.”

The lost souls in the governors’ mansion, and the beasts in human form that scalp Indians on the frontier ‘settlement’, both want to see the white man’s rule extended, right.

But they like to imagine that they are very different—indeed, that the other one hardly appreciates them, right.

Welcome to 17th century America, right….

Not that class doesn’t matter—but the USA itself is a sort of ‘class’, on the international level of community, right….

…. “The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthusiastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed without discussion to be honorable and just.”

(pig German right, but….) (Medien) Arbeit, Macht Frei! 😀….

And you know—people lose their shit about Hitler, right: (banging on the table; you hear it in the hall) to think that could happen in Europe! Anywhere but Europe! Anywhere, but, EUROPE! There are old buildings in Europe! Palefaces built them!

~But it’s like great, we have our own uniquely American form of racism and international aggression, ok…. Good for us, right?….

I mean: do you get a medal for that?…. The other countries just don’t exist for us?…. What’s the line of argument, right….

~The line of argument is, shut the fuck up, libtard.
~The line of argument is…. You might not be the best fit for this position: but, best of luck.

—You know it’s, like: the argument is, this is our custom, and it’s good…. Your argument, though: is taboo.

…. I wonder how many Gypsies Hitler killed out of “an excess…. of disinterested benevolence”, right. Ah, freedom of speech…. (clinks glasses)

The truth is no more polite today, right….

…. The United States must not just pursue its own local interests, but “serve the interests of mankind”, and murder two million yellow men, right. ~(laughter) Richard Wagner made no secret of his androcentric, romantic-patriarchal values, but, perhaps excepting the blackface-crap performances by the Nazi generations: there is really nothing in his operas as bad as ~that, right…. (smiles) People are funny…. They really are…. They decide on all of their customs in a month: and two hundred plus years later, they’re still stuck in a rut, right…. Without even having figured out what exactly they decided on, you know….

…. And yes: fuck the Russian tyranny, right. The Soviets installed their puppets in all those places to destroy the independence of the peoples, and handed a loaded gun to America, right, which was put to deadly use. And perhaps a man bent on murder finds a gun by hook or by crook: but the malfeasance of one’s enemy is so often not just a deadly weapon: but a portal to a place of blood-thirsty savagery, unconscionable deeds.

…. Although many communists are not conveniently aggressive: and have to be liquidated for that very reason, right—

“The fundamental source of strength of the revolutionary movement…. was the appeal of its constructive programs—for example, the land-reform program, which ‘achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds Western readers with communist practices in land reform.’ On the contrary, ‘the principal violence was brought about not by the [Communist] Party but by the [U.S. puppet] government, in its attempts to reinstall the landlords’—the usual pattern, in fact, although not ‘in the minds of Western readers.’”

…. Sometimes people compare “the European countries” favorably with the United States: maybe it should be a comparison with “the small countries” that have meaningful independence, you know. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the Viet Minh or the Vietnamese Communist state considered the wellbeing of the Vietnamese people to be in anything other than their own obvious material (and any other sort of) self-interest, right…. There’s obviously a wealth gap between say Norway, or Ireland, (since what, the 90s, I guess?), and Vietnam: largely because of the story of who the colonizers tried to colonize, and who they traded with, and treated like human beings, right…. But yeah: the small countries, right…. Some of them, anyway. And not all of the big countries, either.

…. “Reporters often did not conceal atrocities committed by the U.S. military forces, although they did not appear to perceive them as atrocities and surely did not express the horror and outrage that would have been manifest if others were the perpetrators, and the United States or its clients the victims.”

…. “They are hunting Asians….”

…. “More revealing was the massacre at nearby My Khe, with ninety civilians reported dead, discovered by the Peers Panel inquiry into the My Lai massacre; proceedings against the officer in charge were dismissed on the grounds that this was merely a normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population murdered or forcibly relocated, a decision that tells us all we need to know about the American war in South Vietnam, but passed without comment.”

It’s amazing how clinical Wikipedia is on My Lai, right. I remember when I was like…. I don’t know: I was young; I still thought we could have empire without murder, you know: and I tried to edit Wikipedia to explain that the Wehrmacht—the Hitler/WWII German Armed Forces—engaged in murder, right: which seemed like a slam dunk, since it was buried in the footnotes and everything, but: true Americans don’t play basketball—no slam dunk. It got reverted and this right-wing gatekeeper told me off for slandering the battle brothers, right, (the Hitler guys): it was so veiled, the language: like he had written it out in Latin and then produced an English translation, right—but it just amounted to calling me a libtard, right: albeit in Latin. Criticizing Hitler from the left would endanger the battle brothers: unacceptable. The point of being a man is to be clinical and detached: ~~~and especially about murder~~~, right: so if you’re going to let a little thing like the Holocaust stop you from being a man: you know, just scram, kid. Go back inside your mom’s vagina.

~And yeah: My Lai was a scandal because it was sexual, right: women got raped. That breaks a taboo: sex is always bad, even victorious male sex, over the conquered enemy…. Liquidating a village is supposed to be about purity, you know. It’s supposed to be clean. This rape shit has to stop.

But then: the very fact that the scandal broke ~because of rape~, means it can be ignored: it has the taint of the feminine, right: it’s very disruptive and difficult to digest for to the male-run empire…. So, just don’t talk about it. A little rape of foreigners never held us back. And you know: feminists get really upset about the rape of American women: that’s really not the way it should be: controversialism, I mean. Rape is one thing: but we have to think about the children, right.

…. “Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for ‘Newsweek’, ‘64 per cent of the nation wide sample said that television’s coverage of the war made them ~more~ supportive of the American effort, and only 26 per cent said that it had intensified their opposition’, leading the journal to conclude that ‘TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war.’”

…. It’s funny how we’re so insecure, you know. “The empire will fall; we’ll lose our privilege, and crumble into destruction, fear, and shame.” It’s like: I’ll always have my male privilege, you know—people make that abundantly clear, if you really look honestly. The only thing that can take it away—in the world/imagination/dogma of empire: is supporting women’s rights—and all the rest of it, right…. Only freedom can make you less of a male, you see….

And in the unlikely event that patriarchy ever decides to take a nap for a few thousand years and transform itself into respect and rationality: I’d have some compensation for my unrequested male privilege, right. People might actually start to trust me!…. God, it’s like I’d be loved, right…. (gets angry) Who could imagine such a terrible sacrilege! Bomb the village! Destroy it! Don’t let the children escape!….

~You know, it’s like…. Comic, despite itself, really.

…. “…. the U.S. war of defense against Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam.”

(hands) What else can you say?

…. “He quotes (a) ‘New York Times’ editor (as saying) ‘we’re an establishment institution’….”

I remember when my life-plan was to help the system survive/negate its own terrible wickedness…. That did not make me happy, right…. And yeah: the radical personality type can be betrayal-obsessed, right: it isn’t bad, it isn’t worse, at least, for the elites to make good—realistically, less awful: that’s almost how they’d define it, some of them, right—decisions…. Wouldn’t you say? But: how can you speak for (a) the system, and (b) the people the system crushes, right?…. “We’re just THAT smart, home boy, 🤪”….

~It’s like: …. Mmm….

…. “The whole village had turned on (us), so the whole village was being destroyed”: sounds like something Goebbels would say, right. It was on NBC…. Actually, it sounds kinda biblical, right…. Like, the war in the desert in ancient times, filtered through many many generations of colonialism: and then it comes out in the end as your childhood—as a morality lesson, right…. I guess it WAS somebody’s idea of a morality lesson, right?

…. I mean: people are worth saving; the system is ~not~ worth saving—right?….

And I guess there might even be Jews and Christians who believe that, right…. Certainly a certain subset of the Jewish population: right, no doubt….

…. “…. to treat the media as a disinformation system disguising a reality that can perhaps be ascertained” by reading in-between the lines.

It’s funny how marginal actually telling the truth makes you. The system’s whole play, it seems, is that the very non-violent suppression of the truth—at least within, most, I guess, of the actual USA/heartland of the empire, (ie not Vietnam, or “operational areas”, right), actually, further marginalizes the truth, right…. People walk away thinking, “He wasn’t shot: and, in exchange: he wouldn’t shut up! The ingratitude in the world today, right!”

…. ~The reporters covering the Tet offensive were all traitors who stabbed us in the back, because they were pessimistic (=disloyal)…. Even though they were less pessimistic than the CIA and various political and military observers in the government. But those people don’t have to prove that they’re loyal, the way we do, you know. The way that, YOU, do…. This is a free system, and it deserves to be defended!

—It just seems like defending the system is entirely vain, you know. If you accept its premise that you need to stand before it and beg for its approval…. It’s a hungry beast, with a ravenous appetite, a bottomless stomach: no matter how much loyalty you toss into it, it will cry, More! More!…. You’re not being loyal! You’re a traitor! You won’t feed me! I’ll eat you up—it’s my right: because I gave you freedom, and you despised it!

~Just everything beyond a literal obedience of the letter of the law, to avoid physical reprisals/terrorism from the police or whatever—which is all anyone does anyway, no matter how loyal they say they are, right…. And it’s all anyone ever expects, really, though this sometimes causes resentment…. And though the “connected” people without scruples can often kinda dispense with following the laws and all that peasant stuff, right….

Yeah: anything in terms of obedience, beyond the avoidance of government reprisals, is just vain, you know…. If you play their game, you can never win…. You’d have to be a better liar than CIA agents, to really get ‘respect’, you know: I mean, words lose their meaning….

And it’s funny: I was miserably unhappy when I really thought I could save this rat trap society from its own toxicity, you know…. After a while it’s like, Why play hero? They don’t want your help: and they don’t deserve it…. Play it cool, Jack…. Play it cool, and all that jazz, right….

Othila the Rat, you know. If I had a rat, I’d name it Othila: because it’s a goddamn rat system, you know. It’s an inheritance of villainy; it really is…. It really, really is….

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A long and exhaustive read that was terribly fascinating, and definitely worth looking into if you’re interested in how contemporary mainstream media upholds existing hegemonies (in like, the leftist way, not the weird infowars “chemicals turning the frogs gay” way). To be honest I'd only really known about Chomsky's linguistic work, so finding out about his radical political beliefs kind of blindsided me. I'm eager to look into his other works sometime in the future

Let me make it clear that my three and a half star rating reflects my reading of this book in 2023: some 35 years after it was written. Unsurprisingly, things have moved on since then and, whilst there is much to take from this work, there are two provisos; the first is that I think we are a little more aware of cultural bias than we were, the second is that there has been a liberalisation of the media through on line blogs, etc. We now all have the ability to express our views. Corporate media and our political masters are much less likely to be believed in their ravings.

An updated version of this work would be a definite five star offeing.

One of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's more substantial written contributions, Manufacturing Consent details a framework dubbed the "propaganda model," which can determine or explain many factors of media reporting found deficient, biased, or just plain incompetent. I found this book to be a poignant and effective review of a period in which media was supposedly keeping an "adversarial stance" towards those in power -- while the contrary continued to be the case.

Even for those who do not believe in the "propaganda model" as explained by the authors, Manufacturing Consent remains an important work for pointing out many circumstances of media bias and societal constraint during the turbulent times of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For those who show more understand the model to be a reliable framework for viewing the behaviour of the media, it is easy to find many circumstances of institutional malfeasance throughout recent decades and up to the current day. For example, while the anti-communist filter, as mentioned, has evolved somewhat into being a general "anti-socialist" dogmatic brick wall, it continues to show itself in media across the spectrum, notably at outlets like Fox News.

I found the principles outlined by the authors described very well and backed with an exhaustive investigation of evidence, in all circumstances evaluated. Furthermore, the book's framework continues to show its relevance. Even though the rise of the internet has 'cracked' corporate media's grip, it still holds fast, as the vast majority of news consumed around the world is produced by corporate media. The version with the updated acknowledgement includes additional information to keep the text relevant in the modern day, including references to internet use, media consolidation and additional examples of the model's effectiveness.

For these reasons, the book is a very compelling read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in broadening their knowledge of how their world really works. show less

One of the founding motives of the United States was that it didn't and doesn't care about the rights of brown or red people. The silly British tried to respect the treaties with the natives in contrast to the Americans' god-given right to Western expansion. The big fault of Chomsky's book is his idealism, the faulty assumption that Americans care what their Buffalo soldiers do in places far away. They don't.

Firstly, caring would demand some minimal knowledge about geography and history. Even after a decade of war, most Americans would probably not be able to correctly identify Afghanistan or Iraq on a world map. Neither could they point out Guatemala or Laos. That the New York Times doesn't cover or relegate events is to a large extent show more due to customer demand. Americans prefer cheap, salty, fat and saccharine fast food not ugly stories about massacres and bad deeds from far-away places. The dis-intermediation of the media industry has shown that "news" is a poor business, even a loss leader.

Given the cost of reporting and the low demand on the one hand and the corporate ownership of the US media on the other, it is hardly surprising that US news is vastly different from what is served in other advanced countries. Cat pictures attract much more views at much lower cost. While Chomsky's explanation is fine, it is overly complex.

For this anniversary edition, Chomsky and co. revisited whether their cases presented held up: Depressingly, they passed with flying colors. The reality uncovered was in most cases even more damning. More helpful, though, would have been a look at the media in other countries. Just like commercial TV stations in European countries survive and prosper with vastly fewer ads and interruptions, the US could have a much more healthy media structure. show less