Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

The double standard reflected in the politicized use of “genocide” is applicable to the treatment of news events more broadly, with the media regularly focusing on the abuse of worthy victims and playing down or neglecting altogether the plight of unworthy victims. As an illustration, we may consider the contrasting media treatment of the alleged killing of some forty Albanians by the Serbs at Racak, Kosovo, on January 15, 1999, and the Indonesian army-militia killing of “up to 200” East Timorese at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999.38 The former was seen as useful by U.S. officials,39 who were trying to ready the U.S. and Western publics for an imminent NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Although the facts in the Racak killings, which occurred