Manufacturing Consent

The Political Economy of the Mass Media

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Summary

A detailed and compelling political study of how elite forces shape mass media.

Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky investigate how an underlying elite consensus structures mainstream media. Here they skilfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.

This book reveals how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press, and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide under Pol Pot.

What emerges from this ground-breaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media can be, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way.

About the authors

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and laureate professor in the Agnes Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and he is equally renowned for his incisive writings on global affairs and U.S. foreign policy. The single most cited and published living author, winner of numerous international awards, Chomsky has written over one hundred books, including the bestselling political works Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World?.

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Edward S Herman