Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.”21 And it has had the effect of creating a world of virtual communities built by advertisers and based on demographics and taste differences of consumers. These consumption- and style-based clusters are at odds with physical communities that share a social life and common concerns and which participate in a democratic order.22

It would be a mistake to conclude from the fact that the public buys and watches the offerings of the increasingly commercialized media that the gradual erosion of the public sphere reflects the preferences and free choices of the public either as citizens or consumers. The citizenry was never given the opportunity to approve or disapprove the wholesale transfer of broadcasting rights to commercial interests back in 1934,25 and the pledge made by those interests, and subsequently by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) itself, that public service offerings would never be buried in favor of the entertainment preferred by advertisers, was never fulfilled.

28 Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq’s treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for Galbraith, Turkey only “represses,” while Iraq engages in “genocide.”

Another notable feature of media reporting on both the Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests, and a throwback to their biased treatment of the protests of the Vietnam War era (1965–75),114 was their exaggeration of protester violence, their downplaying of police provocations and violence, and their complaisance at illegal police tactics designed to limit all protestor actions, peaceable or otherwise.

The federal government’s National Toxicology Program tests about ten to twenty chemicals a year for carcinogenicity (but not for the numerous other possible adverse effects of chemicals); but meanwhile five hundred to a thousand new chemicals enter commerce annually, so our knowledge base steadily declines.131

THE MASS MEDIA SERVE AS A SYSTEM FOR COMMUNICATING messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs—they are the “patrons” who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers’ needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls “normative reference organizations,”50 whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed.51

The magnitude of the public-information operations of large government and corporate bureaucracies that constitute the primary news sources is vast and ensures special access to the media. The Pentagon, for example, has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups.

A final filter is the ideology of anticommunism. Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class position and superior status.

If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil.

In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for “cold-blooded murder,”120 and no boycott.

Between October 1980 and March 1983, five officials of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador were seized and murdered by the security forces. In accord with a propaganda model, these murders should have been of little interest to the U.S. mass media, and this expectation is borne out by evidence. As an illustrative comparison, the New York Times had a grand total of four back-page articles on these five murders,96 whereas, during the same period, the Times had thirty-five articles on the Soviet human-rights activist Natan Sharansky, not all of them on the back pages. The proportionality of attention fits well our general propaganda-model analysis of the media’s treatment of worthy and unworthy victims.

The United States is not obliged to apply the same standard of judgment to a country whose government is avowedly hostile to the U.S. as for a country like El Salvador, where it is not. These people [the Sandinistas] could bring about a situation in Central America which could pose a threat to U.S. security. That allows us to change our yardstick.

Given the earlier similar performance of the mass media in the cases of the U.S.-sponsored elections in the Dominican Republic in 1966 and Vietnam in 1967, we offer the tentative generalization that the U.S. mass media will always find a Third World election sponsored by their own government a “step toward democracy,” and an election held in a country that their government is busily destabilizing a farce and a sham.

As their government sponsors terror in all three states (as well as in Honduras), we may fairly say that the U.S. mass media, despite their righteous self-image as opponents of something called terrorism, serve in fact as loyal agents of terrorism.

the main theme pressed by Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin in his opening address, and by many others at the conference, was the importance and utility of pressing the terrorism issue and of tying terrorism to the Soviet Union.4

In a highly regarded military history and moral tract in justification of the American war, Guenter Lewy describes the purpose of the U.S. air operations of the early 1960s, which involved “indiscriminate killing” and “took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children,” in a manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in “open zones” were “subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets.”

The “first Indochina war,” fought by the French and their client forces and largely supplied by the United States, came to an end with the Geneva Accords of 1954, which established a partition at the 17th parallel pending reunification through elections within two years. The United States pledged not to obstruct these arrangements. The Geneva settlement was quickly undermined by the United States and its client regime because it was taken for granted on all sides that elections would lead to a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh rule. “American intelligence sources were unanimous that Diem [the U.S.-imposed client] would lose any national election,”

Summarizing, from the late 1940s, the United States supported the French war of conquest; overturned the political settlement arranged at Geneva in 1954; established a terrorist client regime in the southern section of the country divided by foreign (i.e., U.S.) force; moved on to open aggression against South Vietnam by 1962 and worked desperately to prevent the political settlement sought by Vietnamese on all sides; and then invaded outright in 1965, initiating an air and ground war that devastated Indochina. Throughout this period, the media presented the U.S. intervention entirely within the framework predicted by a propaganda model.

“an urgent plea from the Vietcong for medical and surgical supplies” to the International Red Cross, “an indication that our bombing raids and infantry sweeps are taking a heavy toll of all kinds of Red equipment.”89

And, in fact, in January 1988, General Dimitri T. Yakov, the Soviet defense minister, applied Freedom House and Braestrup principles to the “adversarial” Soviet press, sharply criticizing articles in Ogonyok and Literaturnaya Gazeta for reporting on the Afghan war in ways that undermined public confidence in the Soviet army and played into the hands of the West.

U.S. forces undertook the violent and destructive post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign in the South, and bombing was intensified to “step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base,” in accordance with the advice of pacification director Robert Komer in April 1967.

goes well beyond the predictions of the propaganda model, exceeding the expected norm of obedience to the state authorities and reaching the level that one finds in totalitarian states.

Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since “the destruction is mutual,” as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U.S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U.S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel “food-for-peace” aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Communist barbarity; the photographs in this case were probable fabrications of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U.S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U.S. government sought to block a shipment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Mennonite Church.184

All of this again reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests.

A measure of its scale and purposes is given by the fact that Laos was “the only country in the world where the United States supports the military budget 100 percent.”1

After U.S. clients won the 1960 elections, rigged so crudely that even the most pro-U.S. observers were appalled, civil war broke out, with the USSR and China backing a coalition extending over virtually the entire political spectrum apart from the extreme right, which was backed by the United States.

By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. [Each] of the informants, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the [material] basis of the civilian society.12

The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.