Manufacturing Consent, by Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky

Five more books every PPE student should read, book four.

This is the fourth in a five-part series. Read the third installment here, and the final part here.

One of the key skills learnt in any university degree is how to conduct effective research by accurately determining the reliability of sources. This is especially important for the three PPE disciplines where hidden, ideologically motivated assumptions often underpin arguments and evidence. Every first-year course drills into students that the best sources are peer reviewed academic journals, but if you are going to reference a more popular source it must be widely trusted and reliable. As such, a free press plays a central role in creating an informed public and is often cited as a defining virtue of contemporary liberal democracies, as opposed to a state-controlled propaganda system. However, the next entry on my list, Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, calls into question the very idea of an independent media.

Herman and Chomsky assert that the political and economic structures of the private media are what motivate and shape the flow of information, rather than the oft touted ideals of journalistic integrity, professional objectivity, and the relentless pursuit of speaking truth to power. They demonstrate concentration of media ownership, income from advertising, the relationship between government officials and journalists, disciplinary accusations, and anti-radical ideological constraints create “filters” that control what sort of stories and perspectives make it to the front page. This distinctive political economy creates a system in which only certain foreign elections are validated as free and fair, select victims are portrayed as deserving, and specific interventions are justified.

Herman and Chomsky construct and apply this “propaganda model” to demonstrate that the supposedly independent mass media functions to reinforce the dominant political and economic ideology in a similar way to overtly state-controlled censorship and broadcasting. In exposing the ideological constraints of mainstream reporting, their analysis also overturns much of the conventional wisdom surrounding important international events, emphasising uncritical media support for the extreme actions that the United States undertakes to maintain global hegemony. Such a model brings into question the credibility of journalists proclaiming the validity of elections in the brutal US client states of Honduras and El Salvador, highlights the hypocritical reporting of genocides in Southeast Asia, and shows that the supposedly combative and treasonous press actually perpetuated the government’s dishonest framing of the Vietnam War.

Although some areas of Manufacturing Consent feel dated in the face of contemporary information technology, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is still extremely insightful and applicable today. Their book forces us to question the credibility and coherence of not only overtly partisan pundits on Sky News but also more respected media outlets such as The Guardian and the Australian Financial Review, and think-tanks such as the Grattan Institute. PPE students who read this work will be equipped with the skills to recognize and combat the ways that a propaganda model influences and controls the flow of information, which is vital to understanding the turbulent times in which we live.

Buy your own copy of Manufacturing Consent from Penguin Books, or borrow it from UQ Library here.

This is the fourth in a five-part series. Read the third installment here, and the final part here.

Joseph Christensen is a fourth-year PPE student at UQ, and has read far too many books. This is his first article for Statecraft.

Thanks to Tom Watson and Daniel Quill for reviewing this article.