Manufacturing Consent

Bought this one used at a bookstore in Missoula years before I ever carried it up the trail, one of those bright eyed idealistic student purchases, and it sat on a shelf longer than it should have. finally packed it up in June, heaviest book in my bag by a fair margin, propaganda model and all, and it turned out to be the right thing to read alone for five months with nothing but a radio and my own opinions to check them against.

Chomsky and Herman’s argument is that the media doesn’t need a conspiracy to filter the news the way it does. ownership structure, advertisers, access to official sources, that does the filtering for it, quietly, structurally, nobody has to tell anybody what to leave out. once you see the model you start applying it everywhere, which up here with two radio check ins a day and no other news source is a strange kind of test.

The first chapter and the conclusion carry the thesis clean and hard. the middle, the Vietnam material, the Cambodia and Laos comparisons, that’s where it turns into a slog, page after page of column inch counts. I believe every bit of it and still found myself skimming by page two hundred, which I gather a fair number of readers admit to as well. Learned things I didn’t know, the East Timor coverage especially, buried under other atrocities because the politics were more convenient that particular year.

I’ve heard people say his later book, How The World Works, covers the same ground better. maybe. this one earned its reputation the hard way, with footnotes instead of shortcuts.

Four stars. Dense, occasionally repetitive, correct in a way that’s hard to argue with and uncomfortable to sit alone with in a tower for a week after finishing it.