Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

The “filters” yield a propaganda result that a totalitarian state would be hard put to surpass.

U.S. mass media, despite their righteous self-image as opponents of something called terrorism, serve in fact as loyal agents of terrorism.

the shooting of the pope by Agca in May 1981 occurred at a time when important Western interests were looking for ways to tie the Soviet Union to “international terrorism.”

The basic Sterling-Henze-Kalb model suffered from a complete absence of credible evidence, a reliance on ideological premises, and internal inconsistencies. As

If we ask the deeper question of why these experts should predominate in the first place, we believe the answer must be found in the power of their sponsors and the congeniality of their views to the corporate community and the mainstream media.

others. Sterling was the outstanding popular expositor of the theme urged upon the conferees at the Jonathan Institute meeting of July 1979 and advocated by the Reagan administration team anxious to create a moral environment for an arms race and global support of counterrevolutionary freedom fighters.

if a critic of the Bulgarian Connection were allowed on the air, the official would “have to make sure that every i was dotted and t crossed; but with Sterling, there were no problems.”

The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthusiastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed without discussion to be honorable and just.

Despite the U.S.-organized terror, the Communist party continued to advocate political action. The outline of strategy for the coming year sent to the South in late 1958 still called for political struggle without the use of arms.57 As

“Actually no one on our side knew what the new people were thinking at all . . . Our requirements were really very simple—we wanted any government which would continue to fight.”

Only the most ardent researcher could have developed a moderately clear understanding of what was taking place in Indochina.

The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue—in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies.

Apart from the live coverage during the Tet offensive, there is very little departure from the principle that the war must be viewed from the standpoint determined by official Washington doctrine—a standpoint that broadened in scope after Tet, as tactical disagreements arose within elite circles.

The reporting was “objective” in that it correctly reported U.S. government statements, raising no question about them, presenting no relevant background, and marginally citing Communist denials while proceeding to report the events as Washington wished them to be perceived.98

summary, the national media, overcome by jingoist passion, failed to provide even minimally adequate coverage of this crucial event, although appropriate skepticism would have been aroused in the mind of the reader of the foreign or “alternative” media, or the reader with the sophistication to treat the media as a disinformation system disguising a reality that can perhaps be ascertained with sufficient energy and dedication.

In the Orwellian world of American journalism, the attempt to seek a political settlement by peaceful means is the use of “military force,” and the use of military force by the United States to block a political settlement is a noble action in defense of the “guiding principle” that the use of military force is illegitimate.

That the United States has a right to conduct military operations in South Vietnam to uproot the NLF and destroy the peasant society in which it was based, that its goals are democracy and self-determination, and that its forces “protect” and “bring security” to South Vietnamese peasants are principles taken for granted in the Braestrup–Freedom House version, where no patriotic assumption or cliché is ever challenged—or even noticed, so deeply rooted are these doctrines.

“there is no available evidence of a direct relationship between the dominant media themes in early 1968 and changes in American mass public opinion vis-à-vis the Vietnam war itself,” but

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.

principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as outright criminal aggression—a war crime—is inexpressible.

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.

This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.

This is quite typical of the actual “societal purpose” of the media on matters that are of significance for established power; not “enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process,” but rather averting any such danger.

the institutional bias of the private mass media “does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.”

The result is a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power.

For the media, the military occupation of a foreign country is incompatible with true democracy only when the occupying power happens to be an enemy of the U.S. government.