| > ...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. |
This goes back far beyond the advent of 'cable news'.
For centuries, newspapers have been created, bought and promulgated mostly for the purposes of making money and promoting the narrative of the owners, often in the form of personal attacks.
Yes, I'm 'projecting' a little but this issue usually takes quite some time and exposure to grasp as most people don't have any direct dealings with it. It comes up way too often with young people referring to Manufacturing Consent as some kind of revelation. The fact is it's a revelation to them, but not objectively a revelation.