2011.09.01 — Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media: Finished 2011.06.18

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
New York. Pantheon Books, 2002.
Pages: 480. ISBN: 978-0-375-71449-8.

Note: The cover shown is to the 1988 edition, 412 pages: ISBN 0-679-72034-0.

Begun 2011.04; finished 2011.06.17.

★★★★★

It's been many weeks, now, since I finished Manufacturing and started this review. In that time I have been wrestling with how to verbalize the feelings that this book has evoked. Sadly, the best description I can give is that it is easily and by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. Writing and re-writing that sentence, with its rather flaccid sentiment took me three days. My brain seems to have been hit hard with the breadth and depth of my state sanctioned and media promulgated ignorance and disinformation. But it has been stunned into gibber-jabber at economic actions that can only be called evil but have been either ignored or sanitized by our media.

I am disappointed and surprised that my having read eight of Chomsky's 150+ books a total of 13 times before tackling Manufacturing did not prepare me against being overwhelmed by the calm, incisive, and persuasive descriptions of both the immeasurable brutality of American foreign policy and the vile complicity of the press. Yes, I knew it was bad — I had come to that conclusion on my own long before I discovered NC.

When I began reading Manufacturing I proceeded with the naïve thought that I'd flag those bits that resonated with me in order to blog at least some of them. And at first that is exactly what did: many of the early pages are purpled with stickies, and it was at that time that it was with excitement, perhaps even zeal, that I blogged those two oh so perfect citations.

But I flagged fewer and fewer pages because I began to realize that what I was reading could not be effectively snipped into even longish quotations. The book is only properly read as a wholeness because every piece of writing supports Herman's and Chomsky's arguments: removing words here and there weakened them because isolated they seem too unbelievable. Before this book I actually thought I understood Chomsky when he's commented that the modern media's need for concision is an extremely effective tool to delimit argument and promote ignorance within the acceptable and the delimited known. And I now understand why he has such vehemence whenever he refutes anyone trying in anyway to mollify in even the tiniest degree the evil that is America's actions in South Vietnam.

Reading Manufacturing created an epiphany. I feel I have been ripped from the flawed world that I thought I had some understanding of and dropped into the fetid mire of an alternative universe.

In response to a comment I made about Manufacturing a co-worker stated the trope about the important role the media played in shortening the Vietnam War. His particular point was of the brutal war photography of a famous photographer (whose name I've now forgotten) who achieved much acclaim for the brutal photographs he took. I found myself unable to even open my mouth to contradict him his belief about the media's role in ending that war. How could I begin to re-articulate the entire text of Manufacturing, which would be the minimum required to exorcise that mystification? It would require both an acceptance of the scale of America's Machiavellian brutality that is all but unimaginable and that that brutality was not only knowingly condoned but significantly abetted by just about all of the news journals and their expert commentators and propagandizing editing and editorializing.

Actually, reading just Manufacturing would likely not be enough, because without additional awareness outside of it and Chomsky Consent is probably unbelievable despite the hundreds of references and extended citations from everyone from Kissenger to President Carter. The scale of the deliberate and utter ruthless annihilation of democracy in Vietnam and Cambodia for the direct and clearly delineated and articulated, but unreported, purposes of American world hegemony is incredulous and sickening. And Vietnam cannot be dismissed as a reporting gaff because the improper reporting of American hegemony continued in South and Latin America. Perhaps most tellingly with how the media reported the rape, murder and mutilation of nine American church women who had left America to provide aide to those being killed by American backed, trained and financed henchmen.

As I mentioned, I was originally going to site lots of things. But after many weeks of struggle, I've decided to focus on why I've used the words 'evil' and 'sickening' to describe the government of America's behaviour in Vietnam and the media's complicity. To set that up, here's an excerpt that perhaps gives a hint of the scale of America's destruction of South Vietnam while they were reportedly 'saving' it:

… [T]here was little [media] reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-controlled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bombings."⁷² The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell because

he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate American atrocities."⁷³…

Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded — that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U.S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U.S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.

The reason for the U.S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U.S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.

It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-52 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic-hamlet program and earlier terror. The U.S. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy — for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded." His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established.⁷⁴

The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue — in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":

A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas of farm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people.⁷⁵

Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alternative rejected on tactical grounds.

In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating us from Communist terror." The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy American bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply." It was left unrepaired, so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew." The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as communists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are ... filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills."⁷⁶

Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,⁷⁷ was controversial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possibility, or because of the impact on international opinion.⁷⁸ But these questions did not arise in the case of U.S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Pentagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc., in South Vietnam, where we were "saving" the population from "aggression." With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U.S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.⁷⁹ (194-6)

As this chapter continues, the destruction of the South Vietnam, which myth has it was being saved by the US from the evils of communism, was just about as destroyed as a land can possibly be destroyed without life there actually being fully exterminated. (I won't elaborate on the US's destruction of Cambodia, which is almost completely unknown and unreported and as extensive.)

This history I can take. I can handle this, it is a political-economic choice of enforced hegemony with weaponry and mass death. But what did throw me for a loop was what the USA did following South Vietnam's near annihilation at their hands. So two more clips from Manufacturing:

…The gradual withdrawal of the increasingly demoralized U.S. military forces led to a diminution of visible protest by the early 1970s, but the "Vietnam syndrome" was never cured. As late as 1982, 72 percent of the public (but far fewer "opinion makers" and, to judge by other evidence cited earlier, virtually none of the "American intellectual elite") regarded the Vietnam War as "more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral," a disparity between the public and its "leaders" that persists as of i986.¹⁵⁷

The primary task facing the ideological institutions in the postwar period was to convince the errant public that the war was "less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million ground troops into an unwinnable war," as the respected New York Times war correspondent Homer Bigart explained, while chastising Gloria Emerson for her unwillingness to adopt this properly moderate view.¹⁵⁸ The "purpose of the war" must be perceived as "preventing North Vietnam from subjugating South Vietnam" (John Midgley), "the real enemy, of course, [being] North Vietnam, supplied and sustained by the Soviet Union and China" (Drew Middleton)¹⁵⁹ — all in defiance of the plain facts. The primary issue was the cost to the United States in its noble endeavour; thus Robert Nisbet describes the "intellectual pleasure" he derived from "a truly distinguished work of history" with a chapter covering the i96os, "with emphasis on the Vietnam War and its devastating impact upon Americans," obviously the only victims worthy of concern.¹⁶⁰ To persuade elite opinion was never much of a problem, since these were the reigning conceptions throughout, and clearly privilege, along with media access, accrues to those who follow this path. But the public has nevertheless remained corrupted.

An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U.S. media—a remarkable achievement, given the agency of destruction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled "Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed," Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at well over 30,000 a year by 1967, "heavily weighted with civilians."¹⁶¹ Crop-destruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial destruction by chemicals, ground operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that "obliterated agricultural lands, often including extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets," leaving the soil "bare, gray and lifeless," in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who compares the operations to the "less efficient" destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. "The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse"; in the "empty landscapes" of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels "300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America."¹⁶²

In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a million acres of farmland were damaged. Much of the land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that "the ecological debilitation from such attack is likely to be of long duration." The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) concluded that the ecology is not only refusing to heal but is worsening, so that a "catastrophe" may result unless billions of dollars are spent to "reconstruct" the land that has been destroyed, a "monumental" task that could be addressed only if the United States were to offer substantial reparations, a possibility that cannot be considered in a cultural climate of abysmal ignorance, chauvinism, and the self-righteous pursuit of self-interest. Destruction of forests has increased the frequency of floods and droughts and aggravated the impact of typhoons, and war damage to dikes (some of which, in the South, were completely destroyed by U.S. bombardment) and other agricultural systems has yet to be repaired. The report notes that "humanitarian and conservationist groups, particularly in the United States, have encountered official resistance and red tape when requesting their governments' authorization to send assistance to Vietnam"—naturally enough, since the United States remains committed to ensure that its achievements are not threatened by recovery of the countries it destroyed (my emphasis).¹⁶³

There is little hint of any of this, or of the similar Carthaginian devastation in Laos and Cambodia, in mainstream U.S. media coverage. Rather, with remarkable uniformity and self-righteousness, the problems of reconstruction, hampered further by the natural catastrophes and continuing war to which the United States has made what contribution it can, are attributed solely to Communist brutality and ineptitude. The sole remaining interest in postwar Vietnam in the U.S. media has been the recovery of remains of U.S. personnel presumed to be killed in action; the Vietnamese preoccupation with other matters serving as further proof of their moral insensitivity.

In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual,"¹⁶⁴ a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own— a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate. Some feel that there may once have been a debt but that it has been amply repaid. Under the headline "The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain," Bernard Gwertzman quotes a State Department official who "said he believed the United States has now paid its moral debt for its involvement on the losing side in Indochina." The remark, which also passed without comment, is illuminating: we owe no debt for mass slaughter and for leaving three countries in ruins, no debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, to the peasants who still die today from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault. Rather, our moral debt results only from the fact that we did not win. By this logic, if the Russians win in Afghanistan, they will have no moral debt at all. Proceeding further, how have we paid our moral debt for failing to win? By resettling Vietnamese refugees fleeing the lands we ravaged, "one of the largest, most dramatic humanitarian efforts in history" according to Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. But "despite the pride," Gwertzman continues, "some voices in the Reagan Administration and in Congress are once again asking whether the war debt has now been paid. . . ."¹⁶⁵

The media are not satisfied with "mutual destruction" that effaces all responsibility for some of the major war crimes of the modern era. Rather, the perpetrator of the crimes must be seen as the injured party. We find headlines reading: "Vietnam, Trying to Be Nicer, Still Has a Long Way to Go." "It's about time the Vietnamese demonstrated some good will," said Charles Printz, of Human Rights Advocates International, referring to negotiations about the Amerasian children who constitute a tiny fraction of the victims of U.S. aggression in Indochina. Barbara Crossette adds that the Vietnamese have also not been sufficiently forthcoming on the matter of remains of American soldiers, although their behavior may be improving: "There has been progress, albeit slow, on the missing Americans." The unresolved problem of the war is what they did to us. Since we were simply defending ourselves from "internal aggression" in Vietnam, it surely makes sense to consider ourselves the victims of the Vietnamese.

In a derisive account of Vietnamese "laments" over the failure of the United States to improve relations with them, Barbara Crossette reports their "continuing exaggeration of Vietnam's importance to Americans" under the headline: "For Vietnamese, Realism Is in Short Supply." The Vietnamese do not comprehend their "irrelevance," she explains with proper imperial contempt. U.S. interest in Vietnam, she continues, is limited to the natural American outrage over Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia (to overthrow our current ally Pol Pot), and its failure to be sufficiently forthcoming "on the issue of American servicemen missing since the end of the war." She cites a Pentagon statement noting that Vietnam "has agreed to return the remains of 20 more servicemen" and expressing the hope that the Communists will proceed "to resolve this long-standing humanitarian issue." She quotes an "Asian official" as saying that "We all know they have the bones somewhere. ... If Hanoi's leaders are serious about building their country, the Vietnamese will have to deal fairly with the United States." When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country. State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: "We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains," she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.¹⁶⁶ It is difficult to know how to react to a cultural climate in which such words can be spoken, evoking no reaction.

According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i.e., the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam — the official enemy, since the U.S. attack against the South cannot be conceded. "North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy," John Corry proclaims in reporting the basic message of an NBC white paper on the war,¹⁶⁷ a stance that is conventional in the mainstream. Corry is indignant that anyone should question this higher truth … (238-41)

And:

...

That the United States suffered a "defeat" in Indochina is a natural perception on the part of those of limitless ambition, who understand "defeat" to mean the achievement only of major goals, while certain minor ones remain beyond our grasp. The perception of an unqualified U.S. "defeat" in the media retrospectives and similar commentary is understandable in part in these terms, in part in terms of the alleged goal of "defending freedom" developed in official propaganda and relayed by the ideological institutions.

Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since "the destruction is mutual," as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U.S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U.S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel "food-for-peace" aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Communist barbarity, the photographs in this case were probable fabrications of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U.S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U.S. government sought to block a shipment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Mennonite Church [my emphasis].¹⁸⁴

A tiny report in the Christian Science Monitor observes that the United States is blocking international shipments of food to Vietnam during a postwar famine, using the food weapon "to punish Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia," according to diplomatic sources. Two days later. Times correspondent Henry Kamm concluded his tour of duty as chief Asian diplomatic correspondent with a long article in which he comments "sadly" on the "considerably reduced quality of life" in Indochina, where in Vietnam "even working animals are rare," for unexplained reasons, in contrast to "the continuing rise, however uneven in many aspects, of the standard of living" elsewhere in the region. In thirty-five paragraphs, he manages to produce not one word on the effects of the U.S. war or the postwar policy of "bleeding Vietnam," as the Far Eastern Economic Review accurately terms it.¹⁸⁵ (247-8)

I don't know why, but the deliberate kicking of the Vietnamese by America's political elite, after their country had been utterly destroyed by American armaments, struck me as far more evil than the decision to destroy them was in the first place. The emotional turmoil that this has evoked in me is still rumbling around my system. I am not sure how, but something changed in me, and I'm at a kind of loss about how to bring that change into my official and proper and comfortable life.


Notes

72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.

73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,'" New Leader, October 24, 1966.

74. See Noam Chomsky. At War With Asia. Pantheon Books, 1971, ISBN 9780006326540, pp. 98f.

75. "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.

76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15,1969; New York Times, April 6, i97i. See Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. 225f., for more details.

77. E.g., Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U.S. Bombers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8,1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.

78. See George Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f., 384, 400, on these perceived risks.

79. See Chomsky For Reasons of State, pp. 4f., 70ff., for documentation from the official record (373-4).

…

157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed., American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1987, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 1982. Among "leaders" (including representatives of churches, voluntary organizations, and ethnic organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared with 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and, perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.

158. New Republic, January 22,1977, see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation,, April 2,1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners and Losers. '

159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30,1985; Drew Middleton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.

160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modem Times, in New York Times Book Review, June 26, 1983, p. 15.

161. New York Times, May 28,1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that "80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.

162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March 11, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U.S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976).

163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); Chitra Subramaniam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.

164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977.

165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.

166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28, 1988; AP, April 7, 1988.

167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985. (p378)

…

184. See our Political Economy of Human Rights: the Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, II, 84, i66ff., 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U.S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U.S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U.S. policy" under the Reagan administration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam."

185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6,1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981. (p379)

2011.05.15 — Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky: Begun 2011.04.25

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
New York. Pantheon Books, 2002.
Pages: 480. ISBN: 978-0-375-71449-8.

[The above is to the currently available edition. The edition I'm citing from — pictured left — is the 1988 edition, 412 pages: ISBN 0-679-72034-0.]

I'm barely into the book — around page 65 — and already it has shown itself to be extremely interesting and important. So much so that I'd like to post several passages from it now. From the preface:

... the democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the media claim that their news choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community. If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to "manage" public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.

The special importance of propaganda in what Walter Lippmann referred to as the "manufacture of consent" has long been recognized by writers on public opinion, propaganda, and the political requirements of social order.

Lippmann himself, writing in the early 1920s, claimed that propaganda had already become "a regular organ of popular government," and was steadily increasing in sophistication and importance. We do not contend that this is all the mass media do, but we believe the propaganda function to be a very important aspect of their overall service (p.xi my emphasis).

And these opening paragraphs set the tone for H&C's calm, detailed and dispassionate examination of both the truthfulness and quality of popular corporate news. Even if you think that H&C are wrong, this opening premise is not justifiably dismissed before examining the careful arguments and detailed evidence that comprise this book.

Because they are presenting the antithetical idea that the free media in America, the land of free, is not really 'free,' H&C have indeed proceeded carefully, with detail and detailed references. That some of the right-leaning ideologues dismiss their argument solely with epithets and rah-rah America is effective proof that they haven't read it — or if they have, further evidence that there is no breadth of untruth that delusion cannot span nor propaganda fail to deify.

I was particularly bemused by H&C's effort to pre-empt standard 'conspiracy theory' arguments that are still being leveled against them.

Institutional critiques such as we present in this book are commonly dismissed by establishment commentators as "conspiracy theories," but this is merely an evasion. We do not use any kind of "conspiracy" hypothesis to explain mass-media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a "free market" analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power (p.xii).

And so far, in what I've read, they haven't proposed a 'conspiracy' as such, but more a confluence of like actions by like people predicated on common principles of capital ownership and the expansion and consolidation of American-based economic power and world hegemony.

And in principle this is an argument that is neither unreasonable nor ideological. The owners of the media are relatively small in number, which is well detailed in Manufacturing Consent. Furthermore, the owners are generally guided by quite narrow and institutional financial demands, the influence of government regulation and advertising revenues, and personal gains in remuneration and social prestige. For these reasons alone, not withstanding a degree of democratic capitalistic ideology, it is not unreasonable to see how the owners of the media, and in turn those whom they pay, will be at least tempted to de-emphasize certain stories and emphasize others from time to time.

Now, it is possible that the ambitious may turn away from the financial and career costs of biting the hands that feed them. But the record of the powerful in history, let alone pragmatic honesty with regards to human nature when faced with wealth or penury, would bely that: greed and ambition are far more stupefying and corrupting than sex ever has been. (E.G. The Golden Goose,

Midas Touch, The Emporer's New Clothes, all attest to the archetypal presence of greed's ability to easily stupefy and for power to facilitate delusion.)

With an honest eye open to the record of human corruption with, by and for the powerful, one would expect that, in a reasonable world, it would be the role of the ideological right to prove that those who are running the country's media and purse strings are keeping to the straight and narrow. However, what we ignorant masses get instead are knee-jerk dismissals and epithets, even after the recent criminal banking practices and multi-mulit-billion dollar payoffs. Perhaps that reality is the true testament to the effectiveness of America's 'democratic' propaganda machine.

And, as if to confirm this argument, a Google search directed me to an interesting talk given by Chomsky following the publication of Manufacturing Consent . In it, paraphrased, he relates his personal experience with the power of media ownership to shred free speech and, worst of all, to stand by while it is done and remain mute. And by that silence rests democracy's quietus, for the media have by their inaction disavowed themselves from integrity, honesty and, worst of all, their responsibility to defend against such attacks on the basis of plain and simple human decency.

March 15, 1989       Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: A Talk Recorded at the Memorial Union Theater on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Wisconsin.

Let me begin with two recent events, both of them widely publicized. The first has to do with the famous Salman Rushdie case. A couple of days ago you may have noticed that the prime minister of Iran suggested a very simple way to resolve the crisis concerning Rushdie. He suggested that what should happen is that all the copies of his book Satanic Verses should simply be burned. And I guess the implication is that if that happened then they could cancel the death sentence. That's one case — lots of [media] coverage. Second case had something to do with an interesting thing that happened here. There was what some people are calling a mega-merger, of two media giants.

Walter Lippman Sep 27, 1937

Time Incorporated and Warner Communications Incorporated. Each of them huge conglomorants, and coming together they've formed, apparently, the world's biggest media empire. Now that also had a lot of publicity, even outside the business pages. And there was concern over the effects of the merger by increasing media concentration so effectively — the effects on freedom of expression.

Well these two events, they seem rather remote from one another. And in a sense they are. But we can draw them together by recalling an event which was not considered important enough to be reported. But which I happen to know about because I was personally involved. The title for this talk is, you may have noticed, "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media." That's actually the title of a recent book I was co-author of with — my co-author was Edward Herman. And the two of us have been working together for many years. Our first book was published in 1974, a book on American foreign policy and the media, in fact. And it was published by a ... flourishing text book publisher, which happened to be a subsidiary of Warner Communications Incorporated.

Well, unless you are a very rare person you never saw that book. And the reason was that when the advertising for the book appeared, after 20, 000 copies were published, one of the executives of Warner Communications saw the advertising and didn't like the feel of it and asked to see the book, and liked it even less. In fact, was appalled. And then followed an interaction which I won't bother describing. But the end result of it was that the parent company, Warner Communication, simply decided to put the publisher out of business, and to end the whole story that way. Now they didn't burn the books, they pulped them. Which is more civilized — and also books don't burn very well, actually, I'm told. They're kind of like bricks. [Some laughter.] But pulping works. And it wasn't just our book that was eliminated, it was all the books published by that publisher.

Well, there are a couple of differences between this and the case of the Prime Minister of Iran. One difference is that this was actually done, not just suggested. [Applause.] The second difference is that it wasn't just one book, it was all books which happened to be tainted by being published by the publisher who had done this bad thing. A third difference is the reaction. The reaction in the case of the Warner Communications putting a publisher out of business to prevent them from publishing our book — the reaction to that was zero. Not because it wasn't known, it was just not considered to be of any significance. Whereas the Rushdie affair, of course, has had a huge furor, as it should. And the prime minister's proposal was greeted with ridicule and contempt, as a demonstration of what you could expect from these barbarous people. So there are some differences (2'08"-6'20").

For the complete talk, go to Manufacturing Consent.

Addendum 2011.05.20
I tried to be lazy with this post by omitting the text's notes. However, it didn't feel right reading Chomsky without reading also his endless, invaluable references. So, without the footnote numbering within the text, here are the footnotes — please consider them to be a kind of reference bibleography. And I have been unable not to include links to various references, bios, etc.

Preface Notes pages x-xiv

1. We use the term "special interests" in its commonsense meaning, not in the Orwellian usage of the Reagan era, where it designates workers, farmers, women, youth, blacks, the aged and infirm, the unemployed—in short, the population at large. Only one group did not merit this appellation: orporations, and their owners and managers. They are not "special interests," they represent the "national interest." This terminology represents the reality of domination and the operational usage of "national interest" for the two major political parties. For a similar view, with evidence of the relevance of this usage to both major political parties, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 37-39 and passim.
2. Herbert Gans, for example, states that "The beliefs that actually make it into the news are professional values that are intrinsic to national journalism and that journalists learn on the job.. .. The rules of news judgment call for ignoring story implications ..." ("Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?" Columbia Journalism Review [Nov.-Dec. 1985], pp. 32-33). In his book Deciding What's News, (New York: Vintage [Out of Print], 1980), Gans contends that media reporters are by and large "objective," but within a framework of beliefs in a set of "enduring values" that include "ethnocentrism" and "responsible capitalism," among others. We would submit that if reporters for Pravda were found to operate within the constraints of belief in the essential justice of the Soviet state and "responsible communism," this would be found to make any further discussion of "objectivity" pointless. Furthermore, as we shall document below, Gans greatly understates the extent to which media reporters work within a limiting framework of assumptions.
3. Neoconservative critiques of the mass media commonly portray them as bastions of liberal, antiestablishment attacks on the system. They ignore the fact that the mass media are large business corporations controlled by very wealthy individuals or other corporations, and that the members of what the neoconservatives describe as the "liberal culture" of the media are hired employees. They also disregard the fact that the members of this liberal culture generally accept the basic premises of the system and differ with other members of the establishment largely on the tactics appropriate to achieving common ends. The neoconservatives are simply not prepared to allow deviations from their own views. In our analysis in chapter i, we describe them as playing the important role of "enforcers," attempting to browbeat the media into excluding from a hearing even the limited dissent now tolerated. For an analysis of the neoconservative view of the media, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, "Ledeen on the Media," in The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 166-70; George Gerbner, "Television: The Mainstreaming of America," in Business and the Media, Conference Report, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, November 19, 1981; Gans, "Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?" [I couldn't find a link to that article, but found this instead: "The Illeberal Media" by Edward s. Herman.]
4. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921; reprint, London: Alien & Unwin, 1932); Harold Lasswell, "Propaganda," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Edward Bemays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928); M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Govemability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon [out of print], 1982), chapter I. and references cited, particularly, Alex Carey, "Reshaping the Truth: Pragmatists and Propagandists in America," Meanjin Quarterly (Australia), vol. 35, no. 4 (1976).
5. Public Opinion, p. 248. Lippmann did not find this objectionable, as "the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality" (p. 310). He was distressed that the incorrigible bias of the press might mislead the "specialized class" as well as the public. The problem, therefore, was how to get adequate information to the decision-making elites (pp. 31-32). This, he believed, might be accomplished by development of a body of independent experts who could give the leadership unbiased advice. Lippmann raised no question about possible personal or class interests of the "specialized class" or the "experts" on whom they might choose to rely, on their ability, or their right, to articulate "the common interest."
6. For example, Claire Sterling and the experts of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies—Walter Laqueur, Michael Ledeen, and Robert Kupperman—have been established as the authorities on terrorism by the mass media; on the Sterling and Paul Henze role in working up the Bulgarian Connection in the plot against the pope, see chapter 4. In the case of Latin America, the media have been compelled to avoid the usual resort to the academic profession for expression of approved opinion, as the profession largely rejects the framework of state propaganda in this instance. It has therefore been necessary to create a new cadre of "experts" (Robert Leiken, Ronald Radosh, Mark Falcon", Susan Kaufman Purcell, etc.) to whom they can turn to satisfy doctrinal needs. See Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), for examples. On the process of creating experts to meet system demands, see our chapter i under "Sourcing MassMedia News."
7. Like other terms of political discourse, the word "democracy" has a technical Orwellian sense when used in rhetorical nights, or in regular "news reporting," to refer to U.S. efforts to establish "democracy." The term refers to systems in which control over resources and the means of violence ensures the rule of elements that will serve the needs of U.S. power. Thus the terror states of El Salvador and Guatemala are "democratic," as is Honduras under the rule of the military and oligarchy, and the collection of wealthy businessmen, bankers, etc., organized by the United States as a front for the Somocista-led mercenary army created by the United States is entitled "the democratic resistance." See further, chapter 3.
8. In the eighty-five opinion columns on Nicaragua that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the first three months of 1986, during the "national debate" preceding the congressional votes on contra aid, not a single one mentioned this elementary fact. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Monograph I (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987).
9. Only two phrases in the eighty-five opinion columns cited in the previous footnote mentioned that the Nicaraguan government had carried out reforms; none of them compared Nicaragua with El Salvador and Guatemala on this important question.
10. See Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (Oxford: Oxfam, 1985); see also chapters 3, 5, and 7, below. n. In an article highly critical of the Reagan "peace plan" for Nicaragua in August 1987, Tom Wicker says, "Whatever his doctrine, the United States has no historic or God-given right to bring democracy to other nations; nor does such a purpose justify the overthrow of governments it does not like" ("That Dog Won't Hunt," New York Times, Aug. 6, 1987). Wicker does not contest the claim that Reagan seeks democracy in Nicaragua; it is just that his means are dubious and his plan won't work. We should note that Wicker is at the outer limits of expressible dissident opinion in the U.S. mass media. See further, chapter 3. For additional references and discussion, see Chomsky, Culture of Terrorism.
12. For example, in response to the Guatemala peace accords of August 1987, the United States immediately escalated the supply flights required to keep its forces in Nicaragua in the field to the phenomenal level of two to three per day. The purpose was to undermine the accords by intensifying the fighting, and to prevent Nicaragua from relaxing its guard so that it could be accused of failing to comply with the accords. These U.S. initiatives were by far the most serious violations of the accords, but they were virtually unmentioned in the media. For a detailed review, see Noam Chomsky, "Is Peace at Hand?" Z magazine (January 1988).
13. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 58-59.
14. A careful reader of the Soviet press could learn facts about the war in Afghanistan that controvert the government line—see chapter 5, pp. 226-27—but these inconvenient facts would not be considered in the West to demonstrate the objectivity of the Soviet press and the adequacy of its coverage of this issue (331-4).