Manufactured Consent
Cover of the first edition
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| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Media of the United States |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
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Publication date
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1988 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 47971712 |
| 381/.4530223 21 | |
| LC Class | P96.E25 H47 2002 |
| Preceded by | The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians |
| Followed by | Necessary Illusions |
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent," employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).
Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom he and co-author E. S. Herman dedicated the book. Four years after publication, Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media was adapted to the cinema as Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), a documentary presentation of the propaganda-model of communication, the politics of the mass-communications business, and a biography of Chomsky.
According to Chomsky, "most of the book" was Herman's work. Herman describes a rough division of labor in preparing the book whereby he was responsible for the preface and chapters 1-4 while Chomsky was responsible for chapters 5-7. According to Herman, the propaganda model described in the book was originally his idea, tracing it back to his 1981 book Corporate Control, Corporate Power.
The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media:
Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media’s dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.
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