"Manufacturing Consent,” by Edward S. Herman &
Noam Chomsky, 1988
This 1980s classic of detailed media deconstruction set
the tone for future leftist criticism of the corporate media, especially over
international affairs. The authors’
methods of counting mentions, noting locations in newspapers, counting ‘reporting’
that merely mimics government talking points, trying to locate (missing) countervailing
views, and noting lack of context or tone or terminology has been adopted by
many, including people like Glenn Greenwald, one of the most prominent media
critics at present.
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| The Propagandists |
Catching lies, omissions, distortions and stenography
from the U.S ‘mass media’ is a full-time job.
Chomsky/Herman’s method of understanding what is actually going on is to
consider all of it based on a ‘propaganda model’ that has the media essentially
parroting the view of the U.S.
ruling class and their government. To
prove this, they look at some case studies: reportage on the conflicts in Central
America in the 1980s; the “Bulgarian” plot to kill the Pope in 1981 and media
coverage of the American invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Their studies affirm that the propaganda
model most closely describes the international performance of the U.S. mass
media almost across the board – ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS; the New York Times, Time
Magazine, Newsweek, Readers Digest, The Washington Post, etc. during these
events. Now cable news and internet
‘news’ outlets accomplish the same mission – providing propaganda,
misinformation or plain entertainment in an even more breezy and witless form.
It is much preferable to have hidden censorship
rather than ‘legal,’ open censorship for the purposes of capitalist governing. Which is why U.S. censorship IS hidden. Chomsky /
Herman describe 5 filters that distill the ‘news’ down to what is acceptable to
the government and corporate rulers - sort of like vodka or gin. This you are
not supposed to know! 1. 9 corporate oligopolies
control most of the news and other media – Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom,
News Corp., Bertelsmann, GE, Sony, AT&T & Vivendi. Film studios, TV networks, music companies,
newspapers, cable networks, magazines, book publishers – all under their wing. Their directors sit on interlocking directorates
for many other corporations. 2. Corporate
advertising. Anyone who does not have capitalist advertising has a difficult
time surviving financially. Advertisers
exert direct and indirect influence over content and generally the ‘news’
organizations will not threaten the money flow. 3. Unquestioning reliance on
government, think tank, business and military ‘experts’ and handouts by
ostensible journalists. 4. Flak when any
news outlet steps out of line, as did CBS when airing their findings that little
Bush II joined the National Guard to evade Vietnam and then barely showed up. The
‘venerable’ Dan Rather lost his job on that one. 5. “Anti-communism
as a national religion and control mechanism.”
While the USSR
is no more, anti-socialism continues to be a well-spring of Republican and UnDemocratic
Party talking points and actions.
Chomsky looks at the murder of a pro-Solidarnosc Polish priest in 1984 and
compares that coverage to the almost non-existent media take on the murders of numerous
leftist priests in Central America during that same period. In the same context, the authors mention that
the Pittston strike in the U.S. coalfields got less publicity in U.S. media than
a miners’ strike in the then-existing USSR.
Words are important in media. Chomsky/Herman show how the word ‘genocide’
is carelessly and loosely used for actions by enemies of the U.S., but never
for allies or itself. The double-standard was especially in play in
descriptions of NATO’ war on and dismemberment of Yugoslavia – Kosovo
particularly. They describe how Cambodia’s
Pol Pot went from genocidal enemy to ally when the Khmer Rouge were ousted by a
Vietnamese intervention. The media
flipped the script virtually on command. ‘Fledging democracy’ is another
tip-off that a fake exercise in voting is about to begin. Friendly dictators
are always ‘moving towards democracy.’ “Reform” is almost universally meant to
mean going backwards, not its original usage, so Orwell would be proud. You will note that no country has the right to
self-defense (or self-determination) against U.S. interests. This is a pillar of the Beltway media
consensus and is never mentioned. The media
role of ‘victim’ is separated by ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ ones in the press –
the ‘worthies’ being victims of political enemies of the U.S. The propaganda model always claims the
‘center’ and excoriates the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ - even when it actually
supports the right-wing. It essentially operates
as a ‘veil’ for the right. Protesters
against elite opinion are either denigrated or ignored, as was shown during the
WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.
Recently Jill Stein’s views on Hillary Clinton were censored from a taped
broadcast on television’s PBS “News Hour”, (with the grim Judy Woodruff looking
on in disgust), which basically gutted the rationale for why Stein was running.
So her one chance at an interview was
bowdlerized.
Marginalized facts are allowed sparingly, as small
stories in the back pages of papers.
Occasionally an event like Watergate is used to show how ‘free’ the
press is, when that was an exception to the rule – and the break-ins’ discovery
actually beneficial to one wing of the ruling class. As the authors note, numerous
FBI break-ins in the offices of the Socialist Workers Party were ignored by the
media. The Iran/Contra scandal, another
example of the ‘free’ press, was centered on the fact that Congress was not
informed, not that the government was illegally backing Contra terrorists
trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
My Lai was also used to proclaim how ‘free’ the press was – catching
this exceptional brutality and pinning it on one low-level officer. What no one but anti-war protesters noted was
that My Lai was the rule, not the exception, for U.S. policy in Vietnam. The story became a cover for that reality.
Lies and distortions by the media that later prove to
be erroneous are never corrected. So
when Ali Agca, the Turkish fascist who shot the Pope in 1981, is shown by
exhaustive research and an Italian court to NOT be connected the Soviets, the
trial result is ignored. When
Salvadorean military officer Roberto D’Aubuisson was ultimately linked to the
murder of Romero, the media ignored it.
They had fuzzily blamed it on leftists or on rogue rightists, not a
prominent member of the general staff.
The acquittals of bête noire Serb leader Slobodan Milosevec and rightist
Vojislav Seselj on charges of genocide or atrocities by a UN War Crimes
tribunal were also buried, as they contradicted the central narrative created
by NATO and the U.S. False suppositions rarely
get corrected – and that is because they were intended as propaganda in the
first place. Even the notorious “Tonkin
Gulf” incident and the absurd Kennedy assassination ‘lone shooter’ theories are
never reevaluated by most media.
The Carter administration backed the El Salvadoran
junta that later murdered Archbishop Romero and many others. Reagan just continued that policy, as did the
media. In that process, elections carried out by ‘our enemy’ Nicaragua were vilified
by the media, while elections in those ‘developing democracies’ El Salvador and
Guatemala – U.S. allies – are heralded.
Even though more objective election observers from other countries said
the Nicaraguan elections were far more fair.
El Salvador and Guatemala had no democratic rights at all at the time of
the ‘elections,’ being countries where the governments used murderous terror to
control the population.
Regarding the “Bulgarian” plot to kill the Pope, the
authors pin the blame on the media itself for running with this ball, by
relying on information from fascists in the Italian secret police and CIA
journalists at Readers’ Digest in 1982.
The only link to Bulgaria was that Ali Agca visited Bulgaria, along with
20 other countries. But it was
politically useful at that point to attempt to inflame Catholic / Solidarnosc opinion
in Poland against the USSR. This section
is a beautiful individual case study of how U.S. propaganda is disseminated. Facts are optional.
The authors show that the rightist idea that ‘television’
lost the war in Vietnam was pure hooey. This was really a plea for censorship,
which has now been carried out in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars through
‘embedded’ reporting. Prior to 1967,
even with all the war violence on TV, the majority of the U.S. population
supported the war according to the polls.
After the 1968 Tet offensive, the U.S. government itself changed its
policy to one of ‘Vietnamization’ and bloody ‘pacification’ programs like
‘protected hamlets’ and the Phoenix assassination squads. They realized the Tet
offensive, carried out by the southern Viet Cong, had retaken the majority of
the countryside back from the U.S. and their puppets. The U.S. population actually became MORE
pro-war for awhile after Tet, thus undermining the whole argument about press
'betrayal' at the time of Tet.
As opposed to U.S. propaganda, the NVA had very few
units in middle or southern Vietnam, nearly all fighting being done by southern
NLF guerrillas. NVA numbers matched the violent
mercenaries from South Korea, Australia and other countries the U.S. had
imported into South Vietnam - another untold story. In 1973 Tom Wicker, one of
the media’s Vietnam ‘doves,’ bought into the Nixon/Kissinger thesis that the
“Communists” broke the 1973 Paris Peace accords, not the U.S. This led to 2 more years of blood-soaked
warfare. Evidently he didn’t read the
agreement, which was a replay of the Geneva accords of 1954 calling for
elections and recognition of the NLF. Again,
elite opinion across the board only differs in tactics or costs, not in
goals.
In the new introduction, Chomsky/Herman do not think
the internet has enhanced democracy or freedom, but has ‘tended on balance to
enhance the applicability of the propaganda model.’ Studies of internet sites
or cable are absent from this book, given its dating.
What is also missing from the book is a look at U.S. journalism schools,
where this book is not taught, even though it should be in Journalism 101
courses across the country. Which is
saying something right there. It seems
many U.S. journalists today are bright, empty-headed careerists who want their
face on TV or their name on a byline, and not much more.
Chomsky and perhaps Herman are liberal anarchists and
so their description of the former USSR and the degenerated workers states
shares some of the fifth filter - anti-communism. The book constantly compares
Pravda to the NYT or other U.S. media, trying to convince readers to apply
their understanding of Pravda to the U.S. situation. This is illustrated by their discussion of
the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
Both papers are outlets for propaganda, but one of them did not
represent a capitalist class, which is a bit significant. This Chomsky/Herman ignore, choosing to be
the academic ‘owls’ that see all 'objectively,’ basing themselves on
‘international law.’
Nevertheless this is an essential book for those
attempting to understand how the U.S. media works. While a bit dated, a new forward in 2000(?)
incorporates new information. I will end
with a quote from the authors: “… a propaganda model suggests that the
‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social
and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society
and the state. (They do this by…) The distribution of concerns, framing of issues,
filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the
bounds of acceptable premises.”
Not ‘news’ anymore to probably the majority of politically-aware
people in the U.S.
Red Frog
September 5, 2016
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