Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

Studies of news sources reveal that a significant proportion of news originates in public relations releases. There are, by one count, 20,000 more public relations agents working to doctor the news today than there are journalists writing it.19

John and Karl Mueller assert that these “sanctions of mass destruction” have caused the deaths of “more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] throughout all history.”

Robert McNamara’s widely publicized book, supposedly a mea culpa and moral tract, is notable for the fact that his notion of the war’s “high costs,” and the error and guilt he feels, extend only to U.S. lives and the effects of the war on “the political unity of our society.”81 He offers neither regrets, moral reflections, nor apologies for his country having invaded, mercilessly bombed, ravaged the land, and killed and wounded millions of innocent people in a small distant peasant society in pursuit of its own political ends.

In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative.

A major National Research Council study of 1984 found that there was no health hazard data available for 78 percent of the chemicals in commerce, and an Environmental Defense Fund update found little change had occurred a dozen years later. 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

During the Reagan years, the number of civilians murdered in Guatemala ran into the tens of thousands, and disappearances and mutilated bodies were a daily occurrence.82 Studies by Amnesty International (AI), Americas Watch (AW), and other human-rights monitors have documented a military machine run amok, with the indiscriminate killing of peasants (including vast numbers of women and children), the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of farmers and villagers into virtual concentration camps, and the enlistment of many hundreds of thousands in compulsory civil patrols.83 Reagan, however, visiting Guatemala in December 1982, commented that head of state Ríos Montt was “totally committed to democracy” and was receiving a “bum rap” on human-rights abuses. Two months earlier, AI released its report describing sixty different Indian villages in which massacres of civilians took place in a three-month period, with the total killed exceeding 2,500.84

Even more compromising is its framing of the U.S. policy debate. According to Time, “Yet Guatemala confronts the Reagan administration with one of its toughest foreign policy challenges: on one hand, the country is viewed as a victim of Cuban-sponsored insurgency, needing U.S. support; on the other, the government obviously violates human rights.” The dichotomy offered by Time is a bit uneven: the Cuban sponsorship is a Cold War ploy for which no evidence has ever been given, but it provides a convenient propaganda framework that is regularly deployed by the State Department to divert attention from its support of mass murderers. Time thus elevates it to equality with a real and extremely serious charge—and without an honest citation even to a political hack. The “on the other hand” is, despite the “obviously,” a gross understatement.

Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an “adversarial stance” with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from the elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and “the influence of democracy abroad,” in the real sense of these words.

In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is considered essential and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the “aggression” of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.

We might ask how we would characterize the Soviet media if the harshest condemnation of the war in Afghanistan that could be expressed in the year 2000 is that Soviet support for the democratic regime in Afghanistan that invited the Russians in might be justified, although the “freedom” that the Soviets were defending was perhaps minimal and the cost was far too high.

The United States was “defending South Vietnam” in the same sense in which the Soviet Union is “defending Afghanistan.”

Similarly, on television, even more conformist than the print media, Peter Jennings, showing Pentagon films on U.S. air attacks, commented that “This is the shape of things to come for Communist aggression in Vietnam,” while NBC’s Jack Perkins, reporting an air-force attack that wiped out a “village unabashedly advertising itself with signs and flags as a Vietcong village,” justified the attack as necessary: “The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed.”

Malcolm Browne quotes a U.S. official who describes B-52 strikes in the South as “the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war”: Every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people. At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gunships, which quickly put them out of their misery.71

Under the headline “The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain,” Bernard Gwertzman quotes a State Department official who “said he believed the United States has now paid its moral debt for its involvement on the losing side in Indochina.” The remark, which also passed without comment, is illuminating: we owe no debt for mass slaughter and for leaving three countries in ruins, no debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, to the peasants who still die today from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault. Rather, our moral debt results only from the fact that we did not win. By this logic, if the Russians win in Afghanistan, they will have no moral debt at all. Proceeding further, how have we paid our moral debt for failing to win?

The massacre of innocents is a problem only among emotional or irresponsible types, or among the “aging adolescents on college faculties who found it rejuvenating to play ‘revolution.’ ” 171 Decent and respectable people remain silent and obedient, devoting themselves to personal gain, concerned only that we too might ultimately face unacceptable threat—a stance not without historical precedent.

“The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy. The tragedy is that this film lacks the conviction to say so.”