[legitster]

There's a couple of problems with Chomsky's book that make it hard to seriously recommend.

The whole book was spent describing a "propaganda model" of news that begins and ends with corporate incentives, profits, and advertising. But he completely ignores the large number of non-profit, independently funded, or publicly owned news sources. And from experience they can exhibit some of the exact same systematized biases! Even without greedy owners.

There's also a lot of conjectures about how news works that simply aren't true or have not existed in decades. He's more interested in pushing his "theory of everything" and making it generic enough to fit any situation anywhere. And the whole idea of using his credibility as a linguist to confidently push a punch of political theories well outside of his actual experience never sat right with me.

There's also an irony that this book was written to combat the media in an era when it was highly trusted and respectable. Now that the media is completely distrusted in America, it's hard to also argue that it's a tool of the elites when it seems dismantling trust in the media is also a tool of elites (which some of his modern contemporaries now argue).

I think the average person is better off reading books about Dick Cheney or the machinations of the War on Terror. You'll actually get a sense how clever people in the seats of power go about actually hijacking the media to take advantage of voters (and the elite!) for particular policy goals.