Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent revisited | The Listening Post

hello I'm Richard gisbert and you're watching a special edition of The Listening Post it's been 30 years now since the publication of one of the most influential books ever written about the institution that we cover the media manufacturing consent the political economy of the mass media was co-authored by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herrmann the book provided searing critiques of journalism and the news media's relationship to power it spelled out how media corporations and the journalists who work for them often end up defending the economic social and political agendas of governments and corporations it walked us through how the media represents certain privileged groups in society while effectively suppressing the voices of others most of us working on this program have been influenced in one way or another by manufacturing consent and so to mark the anniversary of its publication we went to Tucson Arizona to talk to know him Chomsky it's a two-part interview we began by showing professor Chomsky the following animation one that we made last year that boiled down some of the basic arguments that he and Herrmann made in manufacturing consent in 1988 Noam Chomsky co-authored a book with Edward Herrmann called manufacturing consent it blasted apart the notion that media acts as a check on political powers Media operate through five filters the first has to do with ownership mass media firms are big corporations often they're part of even bigger conglomerates their endgame profit and so it's in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit critical journalism takes second place to the needs and interests of the corporation [Music] the second filter exposes the real role of advertising media costs a lot more than consumers will ever pay so who fills the gap advertisers and what are the advertisers paying for audiences and so it isn't so much that the media are selling you a product their output they're also selling advertisers of product you how does the establishment manage the media that's the third filter journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity governments corporations big institutions know how to play the media game they know how to influence the news narrative they feed media scoops official accounts interviews with the experts they make themselves crucial to the process of journalism so those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other if you want to challenge power you'll be pushed to the margins your name won't be down you won't be getting in you lost your access you've lost the story when the media journalists whistleblowers sources stray away from the consensus they get flat that's the fourth filter when the story is inconvenient for the powers that be you'll see the flat machine in action discrediting sources trashing stories and diverting the conversation to manufacture consent you need an enemy a target that common enemy is the fifth filter communism terrorists immigrants enemy a boogeyman to fear helps Corral public opinion five filters one big media theory consent is being manufactured all around you all the time so professor Chomsky does that video capture the ideas that you wanted in that book I think it's brilliantly done I think its success will be measured by whether it encourages people to ask what does it mean when you have concentrated private power producing a product namely audiences for a market which consists of concentrated private power with tight links to state power what do you expect the media output to look like and with that framework of a structural framework behind if it encourages people to ask that question I think it'll be very successful the title manufacturing consent it does get to the crux of how you see the role of the media in Western democracies we get the feeling that you were out to destroy a few myths well interestingly the term the phrase manufacturing consent was not ours we borrowed it from the leading public intellectual of the 20th century walter Lippmann he said that's a new art and democracy to manufacture consent so that the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders his phrase the population will be passive and a quiescent and will accept the rule of the responsible men people like us and in fact the myth is that the media are independent adversarial courageous struggling against power and it's actually true of some very fine often very fine reporters correspondents in fact the media doesn't honest courageous job but within a framework that determines what to discuss what not to discuss and what we try to demonstrate in the book is that if you simply look at the institutional structure of the media within a state capitalist society like ours they're performing a pretty much the way you'd expect we'll get back to the rest of that interview in just a few minutes over the years manufacturing consent has sold millions of copies it's had a profound influence on many accomplished journalists and not just in the u.s. we spoke to three of them the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post's Indian Edition Aman Satie the Israeli journalist Amira Hass and Matt Taibbi an American best known for his work with Rolling Stone magazine we asked them about the book what they took from it and the importance of critical analysis of the global news media today [Music] Manufacturing consent had a big influence on me as a young reporter I had always thought that we lived in a completely free society where the reporting was outstanding the Free Press model worked exactly the way it should and when I read that book I realized that there were significant problems the book and the notion and the analysis first of all unveiled America of the myths of being such a splendid democracy so it was part of Chomsky's and others and attempts to show that there are so many deficiencies in this democracy that are being ignored by many analysts he is saying that there is a superstructure of power that basically uses the media as propaganda that is his his broad formulation and I would push back against that and say that it's not easy to manufacture that kind of consent today because when people receive news it's not like people actually believe everything they see on the news right so I think one of the legacies of manufacturing consent has been that it kind of provided a neat formulation to sum up the unease that people felt with a monolithic production of information [Music] this is a very humanist and optimistic statement the believes that people with information can bring to a change and this is how I started really when I started working in Gaza in the early 90s where did the Israeli public knows nothing about the occupation and what it means I was waiting for for my information to reach others and to change the awareness and I realized quite soon that this was not the case well I think we've seen many graphic examples of how we can manufacture consent through the media I think the ultimate example has to be the invasion of Iraq in 2003 if you had told Americans after 9/11 that we were going to invade a country that had no connection to the 9/11 hijackers and that we were going to do it under the pretense of combating international terrorism most people would have thought you were crazy but we were able to sell that idea relatively easily to the entire American population this is Fox News and Fox News Channel continuing coverage of the campaign which now has begun to liberate and disarm Iraq but all they really needed was a few key voices among the highest opinion makers in the country and on TV the read we get on the people of Iraq is there's no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that and we were able to sell that war pretty easily I think sourcing is actually perhaps one of the most interesting filters that he talks about I think sourcing is something that all journalists have to think a lot about we should think very hard about with which or what are the sources that we give credence and balance to which are the sources that we give importance to and which are the sources we don't give importance to so who decides about the hierarchy what is important what is not important very often I realize that if you have information that is official this is called investigative journalism but if you actually talk about the main at the same thing from the mouths of the people themselves let's say about dangers of a water contamination in Gaza if it's the people themselves this is not seen as a serious or as serious information as when it comes from an official I come from a family of journalists my father was a reporter dating back to the 60s when he started in the business reporters tended to come from more humble origins a lot of people didn't go to college they entered the business as paper kids or as printers when they were 16 or so but in the 70s after all the president's men journalism became sexy it became a thing for upper-class Ivy League kids to do and by the time I was in the business and I'm you know I'm partly representative of this problem because I came from that class myself we all live in cities we represent a certain point of view we hang out with politicians and their aides we are part of the ruling class and our failure to recognize that it's not you know it's not necessarily through any fault of our own but but we're very separate and distinct from the the ordinary person Chomsky's model produces a sense of inevitability which is job even if I see that I have the freedom to write about whatever I want to write about so I'm ski would say yeah that's because there's already a filter in front of you and you don't even know what you contract about how can you how can you that I'm self censoring I'm sure you believe everything but what I'm saying is if you believe something different it's easy to see that people believe what they believe because their consent has been manufactured but what if people know exactly what's going on and still believe what they believe fled and that's terrifying and I think that's what even maybe Chomsky can bring himself to look at the fact that if people say I don't care about the facts I still believe that this should happen and would you say about the whole formulation of manufacturing concept the book and the concept are relevant because they offer to every journalist kind of lighthouse it invokes people's skepticism and this is always important though as I said before I think that the problems are the today we have so much access to information in other ways that we are in a collision with the fact that people are not interested in what does not serve immediately their interest and this is a very sad realization so I think the legacy of Chomsky's book in that sense is that it provides us with a manual of commonly made mistakes and so I think it's something that then makes us think about what we're doing and makes us more mindful of our journalism [Music] when you wrote this book in 1988 roughly fifty corporations controlled every single mass media outlet in the United States now there are just six Time Warner Viacom News Corp Disney among them what effect is that had do you think on democracy in America all of that cheapens and reduces the access to information and understanding now there is a way to compensate for that the internet does allow us to reach to people organize form collectives interact with one another it's possible to use the enormous resources that are available to overcome the impact of the concentration of media and in fact can be done pretty effectively earlier this year American television viewers were treated to the spectacle on the Sinclair Broadcasting System which is not that well-known a company but which owns hundreds of local affiliates in the United States the sharing of biased and false news has come all too common on they put out an editorial an editorial where the same words were read by hundreds of different news anchors small cities in from Kansas to the Florida Panhandle what did you make of all those news anchors in all those markets mouthing those same words and reading those same scripts remember compelled to do so they didn't have a choice you wanted to stay and keep your job you read what Big Brother told you to read this is a mode of propaganda that we associate with totalitarian states the fact that it's done by a private tyranny which is what a corporation is it doesn't change the character of it and it's kind of interesting that in real in actual totalitarian states say the old Soviet Union people studies showed that people tended to distrust the media because it was so obvious that was coming from the state authorities I was founded interesting that after the wall came down all these Western journalists were send in by various Western foundations to train journalists from Eastern Europe Warsaw Pact countries but what I knew of those places was that their news consumers were far more discerning about what information they were taking in and I thought rather than sending Western journalists to quote-unquote train in Russian or polish journalists we should send news consumers from those countries to come West to train us what do you think that idea well the studies of the old Soviet Union which were intensive showed that a large part of the population recognized that what they're getting is controlled authoritarian centered propaganda of the Western system propaganda is nowhere near that crude it looks independent there is a certain amount of variety that when Sinclair sends out a demand that everyone read the same editorial that's unusual it's not the kind of thing that's done in the Western system and the eastern sister it was done and that does lead to a healthy skepticism that's exactly what you noticed we don't have to go back far to the days the halcyon days of social media the Arab Spring 2011 so much optimism in the air and the belief that the rise of these alternative voices on these platforms would have a democratizing effect on governance turns out that that was misguided what happened well first of all there is a positive aspect to the social media almost all activist movements rely on them to bring people together and so on so what happened in the first months the Arab Spring was very exciting you may recall that at one point the dictator Mubarak closed the Internet to try to prevent the social media from functioning what happened is that activism increased because instead of sending messages out electronically people actually talk to each other now that's the base the the central way to organize and and create a kind of culture of what I call collective self-defense you couldn't have foreseen the emergence of the tech giants who are such a big part of the global news media today and their rise has made them unwieldy purveyors of power they've grown rich at the expense of many media outlets has anyone come up with useful ways of how and what to do with them how to deal with them and what to do with it well not really remember that these are not the sources of news like Facebook doesn't have bureaus around the world what these have created is a array of social media which are double-edged sometimes they're used for constructive purposes but they have also become major forces for undermining democracy we see that everywhere right now in Brazil for example with scandals erupting directly about the fact that billions of dollars were spent to produce defamatory information on the social media against the PT the Workers Party to support the literally neo-fascist candidate who won the campaign it's only one example these things are now happening over and over and it's a very dangerous phenomena you've written a great deal about Latin America and a few years back leaders such as Chavez in Venezuela Morales in Bolivia the Kirchner's in Argentina Correa in Ecuador they were all pushing for some form of media reform to spread ownership out to limit the power of conglomerates in Latin America their critics then accused them of basically trying to usurp the powers from the political right and drag them off to the left did the critics of those leaders who were trying to reform media in Latin America actually have a point in fact the problem of in all of the countries you mentioned is they didn't do anywhere near enough to try to set up alternative independent public publicly controlled media that would counter the high concentration of ultra-right media in Latin America which has been a scandal for years manufacturing consent is a considered a seminal work it's not an easy read for people it's and it's a difficult area to explore and dissect on television in particular because of its limitations and the limited attention spans of some of the people who are watching this program in conveying some of these ideas have you ever thought of taking some of those media training courses that those corporate executives take the train them to speak in sound bytes probably not huh I remember once that there was a program called a Nightline television ABC they got a lot of criticism because I was never on the director said I'm not the kind of person they could have on because I don't understand concision namely saying two sentences between ads that's a terrific form of propaganda so for example if you're asked is a Arana terrorist state you can say yes they do this not the other thing if you if you're asked is the United States a terrorist State which of course way beyond Iran you can't say it in two minutes because first you have to break down the prejudices and assumptions and dogmas about the United States being a force for freedom and democracy you can't do that into between two ads so the very idea of concision is a fine technique for imposing that propaganda of the power of those who are powerful they can say anything they want against enemies in two minutes but they can't be exposed in two minutes final question for you when you get up in the morning where do you go to get your news the first thing I look at is the New York Times Stella it's still with all of its flaws and they're real it still has the broadest the most comprehensive coverage of I think any newspaper in the world and then where do you go from there then many other places Washington Post the business press foreign press aljazeera Democracy Now many other sources Noam Chomsky thank you so much for joining us the listening post thank you one of the last points that Chomsky made about starting his news day with the New York Times we included that because we found his response telling know'm Chomsky is among the timeses sharpest critics but he doesn't simply dismiss the newspaper he doesn't as so many people suspicious of the mainstream media have cut the cord and live in a world void of conventional news outlets he goes there but he considers the source he does the diligence shops around gets other views sometimes from outside the American News bubble he co-wrote the book 30 years ago but there's a lesson in there for news consumers trying to make sense of the media today you've been watching a special edition of our program we'll see you next time here at The Listening Post

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Keywords: noam chomsky, youtube, politics, al jazeera, cold war, aljazeera, aljazeera english, media, al jazeera english, journalism, poverty & development, palestine, aljazeera news, press freedom, israel, manufacturing consent, aljazeera live, 📺, noam chomsky (author), propaganda model, 5 filters, english news live, edward herman

Id: pf-tQYcZGM4

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/PeteWenzel]

Submission Statement:

There is an exquisite and oft-quoted moment in an interview between BBC journalist Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky in which Marr asks: "How can you know that I'm self-censoring?".

"I'm not saying you're self censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

Wry as ever, Chomsky exposed the slightly delusional pretensions of the journalistic establishment - and not far behind, the complicities of the media industry with political power.

Harsh? Perhaps. True? All too often.

For many of us who work at The Listening Post, Chomsky's ideas on the media in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media have provided us with a guide, full of cautionary tales and ideas that are still controversial to this day.

The book was published in 1988 - a year before the end of the Cold War when it was announced that western liberal democracy had triumphed, heralding the end of ideology, authoritarianism, and propaganda.

In the past 30 years, we have seen the mass communications industry multiply, providing an illusion of choice, echoing the rhetorics of freedom - of press, of expression - but not necessarily yielding the pluralism liberal democracies had promised.

In that way, the book continues to resonate.

But like all revered texts, Manufacturing Consent also calls upon us as active readers, journalists, citizens to interrogate its premises. Does the book's denunciatory tone risk overstate the power of the media establishment? Does it underestimate the critical faculties of the public? Is the media so homogenous an entity that power can be wielded top-down? Where are the lapses, the blind spots? Where do journalists find pockets of power that serve to disrupt?

We spoke to three journalists who have their careers being disruptive and asked them about the ideas that had influenced them in Chomsky and Herman's book: Matt Taibbi, whose reporting for Rolling Stone has provided one of the most critical accounts of US political history in recent years; Indian editor-in-chief Aman Sethi who questions the premises of Chomsky's book and Amira Hass, the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories.

The first thing we asked Hass was what she thought about Chomsky's statement: "the general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know".

"This is a very humanist and optimistic statement," she responded. "The belief that when people are informed they may act, things may change. In Hebrew, the words knowledge and awareness are all made of the same root. Yedda and Mudaoot. And so awareness is connected to Mudaoot in Hebrew. And this is how I started working in Gaza, aware that the Israeli public knows nothing about the occupation and what it means. But the people do not pick up this information. They have access to it but they choose not to access it."

Hass has been covering Palestine for the best part of 30 years - in that time, sources of information have multiplied, but public outrage?

"Today we have so much access to information in other ways that we are on a collision with the fact that people are not interested in what does not serve immediately their interest," she said, with resignation, "and this is a very sad realisation."

Aman Sethi put it like this:

"It's easy to say that people believe what they believe because their consent has been manufactured. But what if people know exactly what's going on and still believe what they believe, right? Then that's terrifying."

[u/ratguy101]

I've been meaning to read this for ages, but every time I visit a bookstore, it's out of stock. Guess I should order it online or something.