Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent

The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Summary

A detailed and compelling political study of how elite forces shape mass media.

Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky investigate how an underlying elite consensus structures mainstream media. Here they skilfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.

This book reveals how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press, and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide under Pol Pot.

What emerges from this ground-breaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media can be, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way.

About the authors

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a political theorist, activist and linguist. Chomsky is internationally recognised as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. Among the books are Optimism Over Despair, On Palestine, The Precipice, Chronicles of Dissent, On Anarchism and Hegemony or Survival.
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Edward S Herman

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