I just finished chapters 1-4 and 7 of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent. This groundbreaking work of scholarship begins by explaining what media propaganda is and describe how the American mass-media is essentially a propaganda organ of business and government. Despite the lack of enforced state censorship, the stories told by the media must pass through 5 “filters”: The massive size and concentrated ownership of media corporations, reliance on advertising and profit motives, dependence on sanctioned business and government “experts”, organized flak campaigns to keep the media in line, and anticommunism. In all the rest of the chapters, the authors apply this “propaganda model” to a set of several world events to test its validity using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. They look at media coverage of victims of state violence in U.S. backed client states vs. enemy states; elections in central America, the alleged Soviet-Bulgarian plot to assassinate the pope, the Vietnam war, and the campaigns in Laos and Cambodia.

What strikes me the most about this book is how thoroughly the propaganda model holds up, even in examples of journalism which at first glance seem to break the model. While the media coverage of Watergate seemed to be a massive blow to the government, the authors point out how the victim of the Watergate Scandel, the Democratic Party, is a massive and powerful institution. At the same time, revelations were surfacing of far more damaging, deadly, and illegal covert actions against the Socialist Worker’s Party, and the Black Panther Party which received a near media black out. While the book is slightly dated, the concepts, in my view, still hold true for current mass-media. At it’s conclusion, the authors make a rousing call to arms for grassroots and independent media producers, calling on all progressive organizations to take seriously the question of fundamental media reform.

Herman, Edward S. & Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988. Print.