Manufacturing consent

As part of the second reading of my Politically inspired book club, we read Manufacturing consent by Noam Chomsky. We also saw the documentary made with the same title based on interviews with Noam Chomsky.

Manufacturing consent is a book about a thesis by Noam Chomsky saying that how the media follows a propaganda model to steer the public opinion in the direction they want to steer. It states that media coverage is very much influenced by their own interests or interests of the wealthy. The book goes in depth to support this claim by showin many instances where media tried to not cover cases or published lies out rightly in order to hide facts while in other cases, media used extensive coverage/sensationalization to promote its own interests. Examples used are elections in third world countries, vietnam war, coverage of killings of priests in territories which are pro US or anti US.

Here is my take on it - The above all is bad because there is somewhere down, there is an assumption that media is the watchdog of democracy, that media will keep checks and bounds on democracy and will publish facts wherever appropriate. But in reality, media is a big capitalistic enterprise whole sole aim is to make profits for itself and in that process, it will do whatever and not everything will be done in white. If it is profitable to take a nation to war, media will justify its righteousness. If it is profitable to delegitimize a communist govt outside US, media will expose each and every detail of thing that goes wrong.

The book was written in 1988 and by media it mostly means print media and it shows that how all these different media houses are all just renames, in the end they are controlled by 5-6 players only. I didn't read the complete book . I watched the documentary, documentary helped in attaching face to the text of the book but was not helpful beyond that. Documentary highlights the limitation of films in the way that you can not make an argument with all facts in 1 hr. Facts need to be explained, sources attributed, reference checked, tables, stats etc. The documentary can not do that, instead it shows only the conclusions coming from Noam Chomsky and then it shows criticisms based on that. Documentary was made in 1993 i guess, 5 yrs later from book and hence it covers some other material such as Chomsky supporting freedom of rights for a man who said that holocaust never happened.

The meetup link also has some intesting material - http://www.meetup.com/PoliticallyInspired/calendar/12505691/ At the meetup we discussed relevance of this book in current times, things certainly have gone worse. We also discussed how internet and media in internet changes things, with discussion going to advertising :) One thing that made me curious was the reception of this book by media houses and couldnt't find much info. We also discussed that the level of political activism by a common man in 80s was way higher that what it is now, so we were wondering why is that.


But overall, definitely a book to read. highly recommended!