Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Pros:1. Chomsky does a very solid job proving media bias. For instance, in section after section of the book he compares reporting on state-sanctioned terror activites of nations affiliated with the former Soviet Union (e.g. the former Polish communist governement) with reporting on state-sanctioned terror activites conducted by nations affiliated with the United States (e.g. El Salvador). By extensively reviewing media reports he shows how state terror in Poland was thoroughly covered in and denounced by the Western press while state terror in El Salvador was minimized by the Western press. Oftentimes, he will review every single media article written about a given terrorist act. Those reviews consistently show - not that the media is a watchdog of the government - but rather the media's ineffectiveness in revealing government complicity in wrongdoing.2. Chomsky's book provides tools for spotting media bias in the reporting. For instance, he will note that when the media wishes to denounce a foreign government, it will provide graphic details of the personal suffering of the people afflicted by that government's actions - such as stories of torture and imprisonment. However, when the media covers the wrongdoing of a govenment friendly to the United States the same types of acts will be glossed over quickly while the news report will focus, instead, on broad geopolitical statements about the incident. This diverts the reader's attention from the reality of the individual suffering involved. If one reads present day articles with this in mind, it becomes easier to recognize distortions in media coverage.3. The book provides tables comparing the reporting on such issues and events by virtually all mass media publications. These tables clearly demonstrate skewed reporting by reference to qualitative and quantative criteria. They confirm Chomsky's thesis with telling force.Cons:1. Chomsky does not write very well and the book is often difficult to read. He will sometimes write in a reportorial style (just telling the facts) and then shift to a sarcastic style (mimicking the distortion of facts found in classic cases of mis-reporting). He does this without telling you that he has shifted styles and that can make it very difficult to get the drift of what he is trying to convey.2. Sometimes he gets hung up on his personal disputes with some members of the press. While his anger appears justified, he bores the reader with details of things not central to his thesis.3. At times Chomsky overstates the defects of the American media. Chomsky's ample documentation show that his criticisms are indeed well justified, however, he gives inadequate credit to those occasions where the media did its job.4. I think that the book provides an inadequate explanation of the "why" of skewed media reporting. Chomsky does provide many cogent reasons for the existence of media bias. However, I think he misses factors such as misguided patriotism, self reinforcing "conventional wisdom", an ineffective educational system and things of that nature which contribute to the problem.Overall, despite its shortcomings, this is an important work. It is extremely useful in helping citizens understand what they can and cannot trust in mainstream media's reporting of political events. I would strongly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand the actual role of media in the United States.

Is the media free? According to this book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, it is far from free. They argue that the media in America serves to promote the agenda of the elite class in American society. In other words, the media only provide one-sided news coverage. Their main point is that while the misdeeds of enemy nations are widely criticized, the misdeeds of America and American client states are rarely publicized. It's sad when Americans wonder why they are hated by those in other countries. They wonder because they simply don't know what's going on in the world in the name of the American people. The press refuses to print it, not due to any direct control by the government, but because those who control the halls of power are a small elite, and the chiefs of media are a part of that small circle. They have the same boss--multinational corporations.Let's look at one the examples from the book--Central America in the 80's. During this period, the media spent a lot of time demonizing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Herman and Chomsky claim this focus was hypocritical considering the conditions in nearby El Salvador and Guatemala, both ruled by American-supported military governments. In these American client states, there were government-controlled death squads which terrorized and killed political opponents in a bloodbath beyond imagining. If you were going to start labelling terror states, these two states at the time would have been at the top of the list. However, the coverage of these atrocities was weak because it's easy to do business with a tightly-ontrolled military government. On the other hand, Nicaragua, with a type of communist government, was difficult to do business with, so we get lots of negative reports about Nicaragua even though the level of violence wasn't anywhere near the level of violence in the American client states, and if you didn't notice, the majority of violence against Nicaraguan citizens was committed by American backed Contras. So much for America's support of liberty and freedom across the globe. I guess the freedom that really matters is the freedom to grow cheap bananas for the world's supermarkets.As an American citizen myself, I'm worried about such media propoganda leading us down the wrong road. For example, if the media had bothered to do its job before the Iraq War, they would have done a little more investigation inot the Bush administration's bogus WMD claims and its close ties with the oil industry. We would have saved a lot of American and Iraqi lives. I recommend reading this book so that you can see what is really going on with the coverage of the American government's activities overseas. Don't let a few bad men ruin our international reputation.

Es un libro que demuestra de manera factual, extensa y clara como los de " información" tradicionales o más bien de propaganda responden a intereses económicos y políticos a su conveniencia y no al interés de la sociedad. También explica cómo se manipula la información para ganar la narrativa que mejor convenga a sus intereses.Me hubiera gustado que cubrieran un poco más de los medios de información que operan en internet y como estos han venido a cambiar la dinámica de información y han afectado las finanzas, audiencia y credibilidad de muchos medios tradicionales

Good book, heavy content. Informative

nice