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In one of my book groups, we decided to kick off the year with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s classic of media studies, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. I voted for this but for some reason I was under the impression that it was a short book; I was extremely wrong about that. This is a 350-page book only because it is blithely printed with small, single-spaced text on fairly large pages–basically, standard hardback sized pages, but mass market paperback print.
It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).
This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.
It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).
This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.