Manufacturing Consent

Based on Wikipedia: Manufacturing Consent

Here's a puzzle that should keep you up at night: In a country with constitutional protections for free speech, no government censorship office, and thousands of independent news outlets, why does the news so often sound the same? Why do certain stories dominate while others vanish? Why do journalists—smart, educated, well-intentioned people—so reliably produce coverage that serves the interests of the powerful?

In 1988, two scholars proposed an answer that remains controversial precisely because it's so difficult to dismiss.

The Book That Named the Machine

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" didn't just critique American journalism. It offered a structural explanation for how propaganda can flourish in an open society—not through jackbooted censors, but through the ordinary operations of the market.

The title itself tells a story. It's borrowed from Walter Lippmann, the legendary journalist and intellectual who wrote "Public Opinion" in 1922. Lippmann believed that democracy was too important to leave to the masses. The public, he argued, couldn't be trusted to make informed decisions about complex matters. Better to have a "specialized class" manage affairs and—here's the key phrase—"manufacture consent" among the population for policies the experts deemed necessary.

Lippmann meant this approvingly. Herman and Chomsky took the same phrase and turned it into an accusation.

An Unlikely Partnership

The collaboration between Herman and Chomsky was itself unusual. Herman was a professor of finance at the Wharton School, the prestigious business school at the University of Pennsylvania. He understood how corporations worked, how money flowed, how institutional pressures shaped behavior. Chomsky was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, widely considered the most important figure in that field in the twentieth century. He was also a political activist who had been writing about American foreign policy and media for decades.

This wasn't their first time working together. In 1973, they'd published "Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda," a book examining American foreign policy and how the media covered it—or didn't. That book had a remarkable fate: the publisher, a subsidiary of Warner Communications, deliberately destroyed most of the twenty thousand copies printed. The book essentially ceased to exist.

So when Manufacturing Consent appeared fifteen years later, there was already history. The authors had experienced firsthand what happens when powerful interests don't like what you're saying.

Chomsky later said that "most of the book" was Herman's work. Herman himself described a division of labor: he wrote the preface and the first four chapters, while Chomsky handled chapters five through seven. And critically, Herman claimed the propaganda model as his own intellectual invention, tracing it back to his 1981 book "Corporate Control, Corporate Power."

Five Filters, No Conspiracy Required

The heart of the book is what the authors called the "propaganda model." It identifies five "filters" that shape what becomes news and how it gets reported. What makes the model so powerful—and so disturbing—is that it doesn't require any conspiracy. No shadowy figures need to meet in back rooms. The system works through ordinary market forces, professional incentives, and shared assumptions.

Think of it like water flowing downhill. No one needs to direct the water. The landscape determines where it goes.

Filter One: Size, Ownership, and Profit

Major media companies are large corporations. They're owned by even larger corporations or by wealthy individuals. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

This seems obvious, maybe even trivial. But consider the implications. A newspaper or television network that consistently published stories embarrassing to major corporations would find itself in an awkward position. Advertisers might get nervous. The parent company might raise concerns. The board might suggest a change in direction.

No one needs to explicitly censor anything. The structure itself creates pressure.

Moreover, the sheer cost of mass media creates barriers to entry. You can't start a competing national newspaper or television network with pocket change. This means the voices that reach the largest audiences are, by definition, the voices that represent substantial capital—which tends to mean voices that are comfortable with existing power arrangements.

Filter Two: The Advertising License

Here's a fact that sounds mundane but has radical implications: most major media outlets make most of their money from advertising, not from what readers or viewers pay directly.

This means the real customer isn't you. It's the advertiser.

Herman and Chomsky called this the "de facto licensing authority" of advertisers. A media outlet that alienates its advertisers will struggle to survive. This doesn't mean advertisers explicitly dictate content—though sometimes they do. It means that over time, outlets that produce advertiser-friendly content thrive, while those that produce advertiser-unfriendly content wither.

What's advertiser-friendly? Content that puts audiences in a buying mood. Content that doesn't raise uncomfortable questions about, say, the labor practices of major corporations or the environmental costs of consumer culture. Content that attracts affluent audiences with disposable income.

This filter, the authors argued, helps explain why the working-class press largely disappeared in the twentieth century. Papers that served labor interests couldn't attract advertisers who wanted to reach consumers, not workers organizing for higher wages.

Filter Three: Sourcing

Journalism depends on sources. Reporters need people to talk to, documents to cite, events to cover. But where do these sources come from?

Mostly from large institutions. Government agencies. Major corporations. Think tanks. Universities. The military. These organizations have public relations departments. They issue press releases. They hold news conferences. They return phone calls.

All of this makes the journalist's job easier. It "subsidizes" news production, as Herman and Chomsky put it. The alternative—independently investigating every story from scratch—would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

But this convenience comes with strings attached. Sources that are offended by coverage can cut off access. For a reporter who covers the White House or the Pentagon or a particular industry, losing access to official sources could mean losing the ability to do the job.

The result, over time, is that "official" sources become "routine" sources. Their perspectives become the default. Outsiders and critics must struggle just to be heard, and they're always positioned as challengers to the official view rather than as equally legitimate voices.

Filter Four: Flak

Flak is any negative response to media coverage. Letters to the editor. Complaints to advertisers. Organized campaigns. Lawsuits. Congressional hearings. Accusations of bias.

Flak is expensive. It costs money to defend against lawsuits. It costs time to respond to organized pressure campaigns. It costs credibility to be labeled as biased or unfair.

And here's the asymmetry that matters: some groups can generate much more flak than others. Wealthy corporations can fund think tanks that produce critical studies of media coverage. Governments can threaten regulatory action. Organized political movements can flood newsrooms with complaints.

Individual citizens, dispersed and unorganized, can do relatively little.

The result is that certain kinds of coverage—coverage that offends the powerful—generate much more blowback than other kinds. And news organizations, being rational actors, learn to anticipate this. They self-censor, not because they're threatened directly, but because they know what kind of coverage will make their lives difficult.

Filter Five: The Common Enemy

The original 1988 edition identified anti-communism as the fifth filter. This might seem dated, a relic of the Cold War. But Herman and Chomsky weren't just talking about opposition to the Soviet Union. They were identifying a broader mechanism: the use of a feared external enemy to marginalize dissent.

When a common enemy exists—whether communism, terrorism, or some other threat—questioning the consensus becomes not just wrong but suspect. Critics can be accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Debate narrows. Certain questions become unaskable.

Chomsky later argued that after the Cold War ended in 1991, "the war on terror" replaced anti-communism as the primary mechanism of social control. The filter doesn't require communism specifically. It requires fear.

The Model's Architecture

These five filters work together, not in isolation. Imagine them as layers of a pyramid.

At the base sits the media itself—newspapers, television networks, and now social media platforms. These organizations are impressionable because they depend on the layers above for resources and legitimacy.

Above them sit business firms. They control advertising revenue. They serve as sources of information. They can generate flak.

Above the businesses sits the public—but not the public as individuals. Rather, the organized public, the ideological movements that can pressure media and business alike.

And at the top sit governments, particularly the governments of major powers. They have the most resources, the most access, the most ability to reward and punish.

Information flows through this structure, shaped at every level. By the time it reaches audiences, it has been filtered five times over. And again: no conspiracy required. Just the ordinary operation of institutions pursuing their interests within a market system.

What Manufacturing Consent Is Not

It's worth being clear about what the propaganda model doesn't claim.

It doesn't claim that journalists are liars or fools. Most journalists believe they're doing honest work. They probably are. The model describes structural pressures, not individual bad faith.

It doesn't claim that all news is propaganda. Plenty of excellent journalism gets published. The question is what doesn't get published, what angles don't get pursued, what questions don't get asked.

It doesn't claim that the system is perfectly controlled. Stories break through. Scandals erupt. The model describes tendencies, not iron laws.

And it doesn't claim that this is unique to America. Similar pressures operate in any society with concentrated media ownership and advertising-dependent revenue models. The book focused on the United States because that's what the authors knew best and because America presented a particularly interesting case: a society that prides itself on press freedom producing media that so often serves power.

Reception and Controversy

Manufacturing Consent won the Orwell Award in 1989 for "outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse." George Orwell, of course, wrote "1984," the definitive novel about totalitarian propaganda. The award was fitting.

But the book also attracted fierce criticism. Some argued that it was too simplistic, that it couldn't account for the diversity of American media. Others accused the authors of being crypto-communists themselves, deploying Filter Five against them. Still others pointed to examples of media outlets publishing stories critical of powerful interests as evidence that the system wasn't as constrained as Herman and Chomsky claimed.

The authors updated the book in 2002 to address developments like the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2009, they discussed how the internet had affected the model. Did the proliferation of online voices undermine the filters? Or did new dynamics—like the concentration of attention on a few major platforms, the advertising-based revenue models of Facebook and Google, the vulnerability of online media to organized harassment campaigns—simply replicate the old patterns in new forms?

These questions remain unresolved.

When the Model Became Evidence

In 2006, the book itself became a test case for its own thesis. Turkish prosecutors charged the publisher, editors, and translator of the Turkish edition with "stirring hatred among the public" and "denigrating the national identity." The crime? The introduction to the Turkish edition discussed how Turkish media had covered—or failed to cover—the government's suppression of the Kurdish population.

Here was the propaganda model in action: a book analyzing how media serves power was being suppressed by power. The defendants were eventually acquitted, but the prosecution itself made Herman and Chomsky's point.

In 2011, Peking University published a Chinese translation. One can only speculate about how Chinese readers received a book about propaganda in nominally free societies, reading it in an explicitly unfree one.

The Documentary and Continued Influence

In 1992, directors Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick released "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media," a three-hour documentary exploring the book's ideas through interviews with Chomsky and analysis of specific cases. The film first opened at Film Forum in New York and brought the propaganda model to audiences who might never have read a work of political economy.

The documentary emphasized something the book itself sometimes obscured: that behind the abstract model were real consequences. Wars that might have been prevented if the public had been informed. Atrocities that were ignored while lesser crimes committed by official enemies received saturation coverage. Democratic decisions made without access to crucial information.

The Deeper Question

Manufacturing Consent is ultimately about democracy itself. Can democracy function if citizens don't have access to accurate information? Can a free society remain free if its media systematically—even unintentionally—serves power rather than challenging it?

Walter Lippmann thought the answer was no, and he concluded that democracy was therefore limited. The public couldn't really govern itself; it could only consent to being governed by those who knew better.

Herman and Chomsky reached a different conclusion. The problem wasn't that democracy was impossible. The problem was that existing arrangements undermined it. If the filters could be identified, they could perhaps be countered. If citizens understood how the system worked, they might find ways to work around it.

Whether this is optimism or naivety remains an open question. What seems harder to dispute is the diagnosis itself: that in a market society, media will tend to reflect the interests of those who own it, fund it, and source it. That propaganda in a free society works not through coercion but through the ordinary operation of institutional incentives. And that manufacturing consent is entirely possible without anyone admitting—or even recognizing—that's what they're doing.

The book was dedicated to Alex Carey, an Australian social psychologist who had studied corporate propaganda. Chomsky credited Carey with inspiring the entire project. Carey died before the book was published, but his central insight lived on: that the twentieth century had seen three major developments—the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda to protect corporate power from democracy.

Manufacturing Consent was, and remains, an attempt to document how that third development actually works.