Manufacturing Consent is a dazzling book. True, like a lot of co-written books, and especially academic books, it’s written in slow, grinding prose. But for its time, it was intellectually flamboyant, wild even. The ideas in it radiated defiance. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model, they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw. The book’s central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert. The stage-managing of public opinion was “normally not accomplished by crude intervention” but by the keeping of
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