A review by doctorwithoutboundaries
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky

4.0

VICTORY! I have completed this Sisyphean tome, and the insights gleaned are reward enough. More than just a brilliant exposé on “media complicity” aiding and often enabling “government duplicity”, Herman and Chomsky provide the reader with the necessary tools to evaluate the influence of advertisers and owners on mainstream media. It is unlikely that the modern well-informed reader will find the careful differentiation of “Worthy and Unworthy Victims” revelatory, amplified as this phenomenon is on social media, though perhaps I overestimate our number. It is, nevertheless, interesting to read about the effects on long-term foreign policy by such fabricated outrage—an odd vindication of democratic forces in an undemocratic environment. Of particular interest to me was the section on “Legitimizing versus Meaningless Third World Elections: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua”, which has the tendency to come across as a history and civics lesson. But seeing the authors’ propaganda model accurately predict the pattern of refraction of evidence and the ignorance/suppression of inconvenient truths in the mass media, I now have a comprehensive but concise framework within which I can analyse the chaotic and complex elections in India and ascertain which ones are truly “free and fair”—above and beyond simply calling out media bias and self-censorship. Using the coverage of the Indochina Wars to test their model weighed the book down, as this section documents—without accompanying maps—the string of massacres that ravaged the countryside of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The last of these borders at the level of tragedy porn, with frequent reiterations of the injuries inflicted on the land and people first by US B-52 saturation bombing and then by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot. But the end result is that any lingering drops of respect one might have had for the corporate media in America, in collective nostalgia for the supposed glorious days of Cronkite, evaporate quickly when the authors contrast the facts of and after the Tet offensive against their distortion and the limited scope of discussion in the American press.

An essential text in an increasingly right-wing world, this will inform everything that I read henceforth.