The year in books #2: Manufacturing Consent

My second book I finished this year was Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, which explores what the authors see as the failure of the mass media to provide American citizens with accurate, objective information. Basically, their argument is that the state and other powerful actors have the ability to shape coverage and the terms of debate. One way that they do this is through providing or denying access to "expert" sources that lend credibility to a report and comprise a quick, inexpensive way to collect information. Another method that Herman and Chomsky describe is the production of "flak" - retaliatory treatment that seeks to marginalize the voices of those who challenge the official story. The result is what the authors call a "propaganda model" of media, in which the mass news media report events with a great deal of pro-America bias, even to the point of reporting clearly inaccurate information.

I found this book to be utterly fascinating on a number of fronts. The case studies that were used as examples of the "propaganda model" came from America's interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam and Cambodia, which are episodes of American history about which I knew relatively little and was very interested to learn about. The evidence for a "propaganda model" that Herman and Chomsky present from these periods in time was also fascinating, as were the generalizations extrapolated from them. I was quite surprised, for example, to learn just how much money the Pentagon has available for public relations expenditures - I think it's fairly ironic that American taxpayers spend millions of dollars a year to produce propaganda for their own consumption.

The weakness of the book, in my mind, is its own lack of objectivity. The authors' principled objection to wars of aggression is entirely in line with my own ideals, but I think that it detracts from the important point that they are making about the media when they repeatedly present as simple fact that specific episodes were American war crimes. Another shortcoming, though an inevitable one, is that the book feels somewhat dated. Twenty years after its publication, examples from the Vietnam War no longer feel as immediate as they likely did in the late eighties, and the idea that television news is biased is so prosaic that America now has two more or less openly partisan cable news networks.

Final verdict: Definitely worth a read if you're interested in an academic look at systemic media bias and American post-war foreign policy through the mid-eighties. If you have conservative political leanings, make sure you've taken your blood pressure medication.