The Reading List: Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent
By Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

I’m going to do something I don’t usually do with my projects: I am going to exercise some discretion. Specifically, I am going to NOT read a book on the Reading List. I’ve read the introduction, and I’ve skimmed through it, touching down here and there, and determined that to read it is not worth my time and effort – my time and effort that could otherwise be spent, I don’t know, griping about the flag of Cameroon or something.

So obviously, what follows is not a “book review.” But I think I can make a reasonable case for why I’m not reading Manufacturing Consent. So let’s start at the very beginning; it is, we are told, a very good place to start. Let’s look at the first paragraph.

This book centers in what we call a “propaganda model,” an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.

OK, there are several things to say here. Starting with the most important:

1. Um… No shit, Sherlock. All of the above has been patently obvious to anyone with the vaguest knowledge of the American media since long before William Randolph Hearst stoked up the Spanish-American war. This is not to say that it isn’t worth talking about, but talking about it like you’ve just stumbled on to a hitherto undiscovered, sinister secret makes you look a little foolish.

2. Calling the phenomenon a “propaganda model” – hmm, nothing inflammatory there! Nor do section headings within the book such as “2.4.3. The lack of zeal in the search for villainy at the top” inspire perfect confidence that Herman and Chomsky don’t have a bit of a propaganda model of their own going on.

3. The book has to be organized in terms of a “model,” and particularly a vaguely structuralist model, to justify the participation of second author Noam Chomsky, an enormously important figure in the field of structural linguistics. As far as I can tell from my skimming the text, however, the book does not address how the actual material and experiential structures of the news media – newsprint, magazines, radio and television news programming – affect what is and isn’t considered “news.” Which is a pity, because that’s a much more interesting and less obvious topic than “hey, the guys who own the presses influence what gets printed!”

(Hint: because television, the most powerful distributor of alleged “news,” is a primarily visual medium, it inherently privileges unimportant things that are interesting to look at (eg. car chases, fires, groups of people who have gathered together with colorful signs to yell about an issue) or easy to film (eg. a person making a scripted speech at a prearranged time and place, a random person on the street invited to extemporaneously shoot their mouth off about an issue they have no particular interest or expertise in) over really important things that don’t make good visuals (eg. policy making, economic and legal issues, public health.))

Furthermore:

4. As far as I could tell – again, I was just skimming – Herman and Chomsky seem oblivious to some of the more banal dynamics of how news is generated. For instance: when something happens, reporters call a bunch of people who they think might give them some content. What’s going to become news depends in large part on who happens to be sitting by the phone, or who calls back first.

Nor is this simple fact of life irrelevant to what Herman and Chomsky were trying to talk about, because the “powerful societal interests” are obviously in a position to have people stationed by phones, or ready to call back firstest with the mostest – or at least, the most pre-digested – easy-to-reprint thematic content.

5. The book is 22 years old. During the time since it was originally published, much of the pretense of media impartiality has fallen away. Herman and Chomsky’s complaints of insidious media bias seem almost quaint now, when “fair and balanced” FOX News winks at you with only the faintest cheerful pretense that it is not “propagandizing on behalf of the powerful societal interests that control and finance it.” Too, the case studies in the book are events of the 1970s and 1980s, stuff I studied and was concerned about in college and have no particular need to revisit from this late date.


So, with apologies to whoever nominated it for the Reading List, that’s why I didn’t read Manufacturing Consent. I’m not dismissing it entirely – I know that a lot of people found this an enlightening book at the time – but in 2010 I think you’d have to be pretty media-naïve to glean much of contemporary relevance from it.

The Reading List Marches On!

Since I read Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (pictured, left) and skimming the above, I've read Candide, which was a hoot.

Next up is Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is even as we speak waiting for me at the library.

Then it's on to Judy Blume before taking on the big three-part challenge: Iliad, Odyssey, Ulysses.

Whoa.