Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Description: In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies-including the media's dichotomous treatment of "worthy" versus "unworthy" victims, "legitimizing" and "meaningless" Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina-Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media's behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media's handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media's treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way. EDWARD S. HERMAN is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. NOAM CHOMSKY is Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Introduction xi Preface lix 1. A Propaganda Model 1 2. Worthy and Unworthy Victims 37 3. Legitimizing versus Meaningless Third World Elections: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua 87 4. The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope: Free-Market Disinformation as "News" 143 5. The Indochina Wars (I): Vietnam 169 6. The Indochina Ware (II): Laos and Cambodia 253 7. Conclusions 297 Appendix 1: The U.S. Official Observers in Guatemala, July 1-2, 1984 309 Appendix 2: Tagliabue's Finale on the Bulgarian Connection: A Case Study in Bian 313 Appendix 3: Braestrup's Big Story: Some "Freedom House Exclusives" 321 Notes 331 Index 395

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