Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent

You write in Manufacturing Consent that is the primary function of the mass media in the US to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector what are those interests? Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other the first place to look is who's in a position to make the decissions that determine the way the society functions? societies differ but in ours the major decisions over what happens in this society the decisions over investment, and production and distribution and so on are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government and they are the ones who own the media and they are the ones who have to be in a possition to make the decisions they have an overwhelming with donor role in the way life happens, you know what's done in the society within the economic system by law and in principle they dominate their control of the resources in the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constrains on the political system and the ideological system When you talk about manufacturing of consent Whose consent is being manufactured?

We can start with, there are two different groups we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation there's two targets for propaganda One is what's sometimes called the political class There is, maybe, 20% of the population which is relatively educated more or less articulated They play some kind of role in decision making they're supposed to sort of participate in social life either as managers or cultural managers like, say, teachers, writers, and so on they're supposed to vote, they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on now their consent is crucial. One group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's, maybe, 80% of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not to think, you know, and not to pay attention, anything.

. . and the other ones are usually pay the cost all right professor Chomsky, Noam.

You've outlined a model, with filters, and propaganda is central that's way too public you'd briefly out on those it's basically an institutional analysis of the major media what we call a propaganda model we're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs now the elite media are the sort of the agenda-setting media, that means the New York Times, The Washington Post the major television channels and so on They set the general framework local media more or less adapt to their structure World News! And they do this in all sorts of ways by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, framing of issues, by filtering of information by bounding of debate within certain limits they determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict, in order to serve the interests of the dominant elite groups in society. there is an unusual a lot of attention focus today on the five nations of Central America This is Democracy's Diary.

Here for our instruction our triumphs and disasters the pattern of life's changing fabric. Here is great journalism a revelation of the past, a guide to the present, and a clue to the future. New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world.

The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active educated classes. Also the New York Times has a special role, and i believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden in the sense that the New York Times creates History. What happened years ago may have a bearing on what happens tomorrow.

Millions of clippings are preserved in The Times library, all indexed for instant use. A priceless archive of events and the men who made them. That is: History is what appears in The New York Times archives, The place where people will go to find out what happened is New York Times, therefore it's extremely important that History is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion.

Now in whose interests is that History being so shaped? Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer. Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias.

According to the propaganda model both liberal and conservative wings of the media, whatever those terms are supposed to mean, fall within the same framework of assumptions. In fact, if the system functions well it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to, because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively. In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial, and liberal, and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond there?

they're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond there will be a takeoff from a planet so therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct, can't go beyond them. And a well functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind: the media will then serve to say, in effect, "thus far and no further". And we ask what would you expect of those media?

just relatively uncontroversial guided free market assumptions, and when you look at them you found a number of major factors entering into determining what their products are. These are what we call the filters, so one of them, for example, is ownership. Who owns them?

The major agenda-setting media, after all, what are they? As institutions in the society, what are they? Well, in the first place they are major corporations, in fact huge corporations.

Furthermore, they are integrated with, and sometimes owned, by even larger corporations conglomerates. So, for example, by Westinghouse and GE, and so on What I wanted to know was how specifically the elites control the media? What I mean is.

. . I guess.

. . How do the elites control General Motors?

Why isn't that a question? I mean, General Motors is an institution of the elites, they don't have to control that they own it. so what we have in first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates.

Now, like any other corporation they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers, that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience, they make money from their advertisers, and remember we're talking about the elite media, so they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates, and ask your friends in the advertising industry that means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience, that raises advertising rates.

So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses. Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this. Without any further assumptions what you predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs, and the interests, and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers, and the product.

Now, there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter in the system, who don't have that point of view, they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct.

It's not the way institutions function. So they all work to exclude, or marginalize, or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional. They're dysfunction of the institution itself.