Manufacturing Consent for Genocide: How American News Media is Self-Destructing
Many distrust the student protestors, and many seethe with hatred for them. They smear them. Call them antisemites. Paint them as uninformed, naive, idealistic, stupid, misguided, duped, brainwashed. Their critics say they are merely pretending, virtue signaling, uncommitted to any meaningful work that would actually lead toward peace for Palestinians and Israelis. Many outright accuse them of supporting Hamas or being Hamas. American media labels them one of the few words we label people when we want to fully take away their humanity, violate their every right, subject them to violence of every form, and often remove their freedom permanently: terrorist.
We have lost sight of the fact that once America begins to paint whole populations of our own people as enemies — as terrorists — we begin down a well worn and incredibly destructive historical path. If we care at all about freedom or personal liberty then we should all be mortified and ashamed and outraged at the violent, state-sanctioned crushing of dissent. We all watched as police, mobilized and outfitted like the military, stormed Columbia and City College of New York to beat, throw, and kick protestors whose crimes were trespassing and burglary. Nonviolent offenses affecting property, not human life. Benjamin Netanyahu himself compared these student protestors — while they were being beaten by police — to Nazis.
We are becoming blind to the students’ single, solitary demand: ceasefire, now. Some protestors have gone further, demanding divestment from Israel, but all of the protestors agree — and those of us who genuinely want peace and an end to violence agree — that a ceasefire is the single most important demand. Nazis were never known for pleading for ceasefires.
How have we been led here? How have so many of us come to believe that the people protesting for an end to violence are the evil ones, the enemy, the anti-Semitic? How can so many of us not see the basic humanity of Palestinians? How do these beliefs spread and become so pervasively held?
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky was published in 1988. Its most salient point is simple: American mass media companies are profit driven enterprises, they are therefore beholden to their financial owners and their governmental regulators (and sources). They will purposely distort information to make it fall in line with the narratives that their owners want the general public to believe. And their owners — the rich and the powerful, the movers of society — profit from things being exactly the way they are.
The world, as we all know it, is a world that has resulted in extreme wealth for the powerful and a struggle for survival for the rest of us. Of course they crush any attempt at changing the system that gives them this result. Part of how they crush this dissent, is through the media. We often make the mistake of thinking the news is only about other things, and has no particular agenda or message of its own. But all news media have private agendas. That includes protecting the reputation and image of their owners, protecting profitable business relationships they have, and controlling information distribution in such a way as to tell one overarching narrative across all their media. The subliminal overarching narrative during this current horror in Gaza has been: Israel cannot be criticized.
For the powerful, Israel is an important piece of American dominance in the Middle East. Israel, by threat of nuclear weapons, keeps order in the Middle East — order favorable to the United States. This is why the powerful in America refuse to hear any criticism of Israel: they must let Israel do what it wants to Palestinians in exchange for Israel being essentially a massive military base for American power in the Middle East. A few loud kids on college campuses aren’t going to ruin their profitable order of things. The powerful snap their fingers and the armored police show up to dispense brutality on these dissenting students in order to frighten the rest of us: Israel cannot be criticized.
However, we are seeing now the traditional, mainstream news media starting to lose grip on its control over the narrative. More and more people are waking up to the reality of life on the ground for Palestinians. More people are realizing it has been a brutal existence for a long time. Now the Israeli mass murder of Palestinians is being committed so openly, so brazenly, and American media in its pretense of “balance” responds with: “Isn’t this awful? If only we could figure out how it keeps happening.”
Of course young people no longer trust the mainstream media, it is completely impotent, totally unable to state the most obvious truth: Israel is killing Palestinian civilians on purpose. Their clear intention is to maim, kill, and exile the surviving Gazans to refugees. This is only a fact that you cannot see when you are too busy trying to find evidence to support a lie. The Israeli “evidence” that they are not committing a genocide has all been flimsy, lazy, half-assed lies. Lies debunked in hours.
The student protestors demanding an end to the slaughter of Palestinians are painted as liars by the same people who insist Hamas uses “human shields” — a pathetic lie that has been thoroughly debunked. It is an especially disgusting lie considering Israel actually uses human shields — See for yourself. And a recent report by +972 revealed that the Israeli military uses an AI-based targeting system called “Where’s Daddy?” that they use to follow alleged Hamas militants home to their families at night — so Israel can kill them all. Israel has reportedly greenlit killing up to 20 civilians at a time in order to kill a junior Hamas militant. They are willing to kill up to 100 civilians for senior Hamas leaders.
From the +972 report:
“All the sources interviewed for this investigation said that Hamas’ massacres on October 7 and kidnapping of hostages greatly influenced the army’s fire policy and collateral damage degrees. “At first, the atmosphere was painful and vindictive,” said B., who was drafted into the army immediately after October 7, and served in a target operation room. “The rules were very lenient. They took down four buildings when they knew the target was in one of them. It was crazy.”
To pretend that what Israel is doing is anything less than the purposeful mass murder of civilians is to be delusional. Of course, this report will likely get nothing but a passing mention on news television. It’s quite the easy tactic for the powerful: ignore it. Give no attention to the report. Or, flood the media with an ocean of other distracting stories — celebrity baby births, a contained political scandal — the only facts about the genocide in Gaza strictly delivered to them by the Israeli military. What a trustworthy source…
American news media stands to lose the last of its credibility over this genocide, this vicious revenge upon the entirety of Gaza. Its inability to articulate the reality of the situation, its subservience to rich American and Israeli interests, its demonizing and propagandizing against young protestors — these choices of the media will lead to its irrelevance and demise. Young people are seeing through the propaganda. As time shifts, as the young gain more power, more influence, the news media will not know what else to do other than to demonize them further, and thereby solidify their own cultural undoing. By ignoring and distorting the reality of the present, American media ensures itself no future.
