Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent", employed in the book Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. The consent referred to is consent of the governed. The book was revised in 2002, 20 years after its first publication, to take account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. There has been debate about how the Internet has changed the public's access to information since 1988.
Origins of the book
Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom Herman and he dedicated the book. The book was greatly inspired by Herman's earlier financial research. Since Herman's contribution to the book was so important, Chomsky insisted on putting Herman's name in front of his name, contrary to the pair’s habit of alphabetic listing. Herman and Chomsky were close friends for fifty years.
Propaganda model of communication
The book introduced the propaganda model of communication, which is still developing today.
Five filters of editorial bias
The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media:
Size, ownership, and profit orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.
The advertising license to do business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising, advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority". Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.
Sourcing mass media news: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access , by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.
Flak and the enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups. The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.
Anti-communism/war on terror: Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold Waranticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism.
Authorship
According to Chomsky, "most of the book" was the work of Edward S. Herman. Herman describes a rough division of labor in preparing the book whereby he was responsible for the preface and chapters 1–4 while Chomsky was responsible for chapters 5–7. According to Herman, the propaganda model described in the book was originally his idea, tracing it back to his 1981 book Corporate Control, Corporate Power. The main elements of the propaganda model were discussed briefly in volume 1 chapter 2 of Herman and Chomsky's 1979 book The Political Economy of Human Rights, where they argued, "Especially where the issues involve substantial U.S. economic and political interests and relationships with friendly or hostile states, the mass media usually function much in the manner of state propaganda agencies." Herman was a professor of finance at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Chomsky is a linguist and activist scholar. He wrote Towards a New Cold War and other books. The two authors won the Orwell Award for Manufacturing Consent. Before Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988, the two authors had collaborated on the same subject before. Their book , a book about American foreign policy and the media, was published in 1973. The publisher for the book, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Incorporated, was deliberately put out of business after printing 20,000 copies of the book, most of which were destroyed, so the book was not widely known.
Further developments
In 2006, the Turkish government prosecuted Fatih Tas, owner of the Aram editorial house, two editors and the translator of the revised edition of Manufacturing Consent for "stirring hatred among the public" and for "denigrating the national identity" of Turkey, because that edition's introduction addresses the Turkish news media's reportage of governmental suppression of the Kurdish populace in the 1990s; they were acquitted.
In 2007, at the 20 Years of Propaganda?: Critical Discussions & Evidence on the Ongoing Relevance of the Herman & Chomsky Propaganda Model conference at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Herman and Chomsky summarized developments to the propaganda model on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of publication of Manufacturing Consent.
In 2011, the book was translated into Chinese; the publisher of the translation is Peking University. However, the real insights for this book and the U.S.'s role on the international political media are not consistent with Chinese education on the communication theory. Thus, Chinese students only learn the propaganda model as the theory to learn about the media in the United States.
Film adaptation
Four years after publication, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media was adapted as , a documentary film that discusses the propaganda model of communication and the politics of the mass-communications business, as well as a biography of Chomsky. The film was directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. The length of this film is three hours and was firstly opened in the film forum. The film was conducted in English and was released in several English spoken countries. The origin-country for this film is Canada. The documentary film for this book is a visual version to express the ideas from the linguist, Noam Chomsky.
