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Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #5
- NOT RATED
- Year:
- 1992
- 167 min
- 1,828 Views
to their structure.
World news.
It's a sound bite,
that says there's a beach head...
I think 628 is a good one.
This is the operative sound bite for us.
Got a minute for all the times.
I love this sound bite.
And they do this in all sorts of ways, by...
Two and a half minutes to air.
There is an unusual amount of attention today
on the five nations of Central America.
This is democracy's diary.
Here, for our instruction,
are triumphs and disasters,
the pattern of life's changing fabric.
Here is great journalism,
a revelation of the past, a guide to the present,
and a clue to the future.
The New York Times is certainly the most
important newspaper in the United States,
and one could argue,
the most important newspaper in the world.
The New York Times plays an enormous role
in shaping the perception of the current world
on the part of
the politically active, educated classes.
Also, The New York Times has a special role,
and I believe its editors probably feel
that they bear a heavy burden
in the sense that
The New York Times creates history.
have a bearing on what happens tomorrow.
Millions of clippings
are preserved in the Times'library,
A priceless archive of events,
and the men who make them.
That is, history is what appears in
The New York Times archives.
The place where people will go to find out
what happened is The New York Times.
Therefore it's extremely important,
if history is to be shaped in an appropriate way,
that certain things appear, certain things do not,
certain questions be asked, others be ignored,
and that issues be framed
in a particular fashion.
Now, in whose interests
Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer.
The process by which
people make up their minds on this
is a much more mysterious process
than you would ever guess
from reading Manufacturing Consent.
There is a saying about legislation,
that legislation is like making sausage.
The less you know about how it's done,
the better for your appetite.
The same is true of this business.
If you're in a conference
in which decisions are being made
on what to put on page one, or what not,
you would get, I think, the impression
that important decisions were being made
in a flippant and frivolous way,
but in fact, given the pressures of time
to try to get things out,
you resort to a kind of a shorthand,
and you have to fill that paper up every day.
It's curious in a kind of a mirror image way that
Professor Chomsky is in total accord
with Reed Irvine
who at the right-wing end of the spectrum
says exactly what Chomsky does
about the insinuating influence of the press,
of the big media
as "agenda setters", to use
one of the great buzz words of the time,
and, of course,
Reed Irvine sees this as a let-wing conspiracy,
of foisting liberal ideas in both domestic
and foreign affairs on the American people.
But in both cases,
I think that the premise really is an insult
to the intelligence of the people
who consume news.
Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has
nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias.
According to the propaganda model, both
liberal and conservative wings of the media,
whatever those terms are supposed to mean,
fall within the same framework of assumptions.
In fact, if the system functions well, it ought
to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to,
because if it appears to have a liberal bias,
that will serve to bound thought
even more effectively.
In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial
and liberal, and all these bad things,
then how can I go beyond it?
They're already so extreme in their opposition
would be to take off from the planet,
so therefore it must be that the presuppositions
that are accepted in the liberal media
are sacrosanct.
Can't go beyond them.
And a well-functioning system
would in fact have a bias of that kind.
The media would then serve to say, in effect:
Thus far and no further.
We ask what would you expect of those media
on just relatively uncontroversial,
guided-free market assumptions?
And when you look at them,
you find a number of major factors
entering into
determining what their products are.
These are what we call the filters -
so one of them, for example, is ownership.
Who owns them?
The major agenda-setting media,
ater all, what are they?
As institutions in the society, what are they?
Well, in the first place
they are major corporations.
In fact, huge corporations.
Furthermore, they're integrated with, and
sometimes owned by, even larger corporations,
conglomerates, so, for example,
by Westinghouse, GE and so on.
What I wanted to know was
how specifically the elites control the media.
That's like asking,
"How do the elites control General Motors"?
Why isn't that a question?
I mean, General Motors is an institution of the
elites. They don't have to control it. They own it.
Except I guess, at a certain level I think...
Like, I guess... I work with student press,
so I know, like, reporters and stuff...
Elites don't control the student press,
but I'll tell you something -
you try in the student press
to do anything that breaks out of conventions,
and you're going to have the whole business
community around here down on your neck,
and the university's going to get threatened,
and you know...
Maybe nobody'll pay any attention to you.
That's possible.
If you get to the point
where they don't stop paying attention to you,
the pressures'll start coming.
Because there are people with power,
there are people who own the country,
and they're not going to
let the country get out of control.
This is the old cabal theory that somewhere
there's a room with a baize-covered desk,
and there are a bunch of capitalists
sitting around pulling strings.
These rooms don't exist.
I hate to tell Noam Chomsky this.
- You don't share that view?
- It's the most absolute rubbish I've ever heard.
It's the fashion in the universities.
It's patent nonsense,
and I think it's nothing but a fashion.
It's a way that...
intellectuals have of... of feeling like a clergy.
There has to be something wrong.
So, what we have in the first place
is major corporations
which are parts of even bigger conglomerates.
Now, like any other corporation, they...
they have a product which they sell to a market.
The market is advertisers,
that is, other businesses.
What keeps the media functioning
is not the audience.
They make money from their advertisers, and
remember, we're talking about the elite media,
so they're trying to sell a good product,
a product which raises advertising rates.
And ask your friends in the advertising industry.
That means
that they want to adjust their audience
to the more elite and affluent audience.
That raises advertising rates.
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"Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Aug. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/manufacturing_consent:_noam_chomsky_and_the_media_13340>.
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