Just want to point out that while often manufacturing consent is seen in a negative light because it’s been used to negatively manipulate people that it is also also possible to be used to the better good (vaccinations, education, etc. of course this can get abused and thus the negative aspect).
I disagree. It's not the job of journalism to manipulate people, even if they think they're doing it for a good cause. Jim Lehrer's rules are very correct here.
I think we’re talking past each other. Manufacturing consent isn’t always about lying or making things up. It can be presenting a united front on something and it entails telling the truth with which you’re persuading a pop to see that POV.
"I've never heard manufacturing consent used like that. Do you have any examples of what you're talking about? Genuinely curious."
It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.
Highlighting the positive aspects of whatever you're doing, avoiding the negative aspects, discrediting opponents and most insidiously - misrepresenting their arguments is how it's done.
It's about creating the intended narrative around a specific subject.
Take any controversial issue and you'll generally see that the 'sides' are not having a debate in public, they're engaging in framing the issue in a manner. The end up talking past one another entirely.
'Manufacturing Consent' is a funny book, because we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened to the reality of the world and the perennial war of ideas. Because such activities are framed as nefarious and related to questionable acts of intervention (i.e. US intervention in S. America) ... we are 'shocked and outraged'. But I think looking at it from a more mature, contextualized perspective, it doesn't seem 'shocking' it seems really normal.
Ironically the real coup of Chomsky is to misrepresent the nature of 'mass idea marketing' in a fair antagonist way that I don't think is really helpful.
Unfortunately - almost all news is narrative-driven.
Certainly the entirety of cable news.
If you watch the local news, it feels dry and mundane, because it's generally very truthful, and there isn't a lot of 'war of ideas' over the dog that called 911.
But for everything in pop culture and politics, there's a way to frame the subject in an ideological way (or in a manner that represents the interests of some group like advertisers or powerful individuals etc.) which is what happens all day long.
> ...we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened...
First, you're projecting.
Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".
Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.
> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.
This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.
The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.
And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.
Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.
You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.