Manufacturing Consent

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.

"[A] compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions in American foreign policy of the past quarter century."--Walter LaFeber, The New York Times Book Review

Edward S. Herman is Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power; The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda; Demonstration Elections: U. S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and El Salvador (with Frank Brodhead) and The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (with Frank Brodhead). Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. A member of the American Academy of Science, he has published widely in both linguistics and current affairs. His previous books include At War with Asia, American Power and the New Mandarins, For Reasons of State, Peace in the Middle East?, Towards a New Cold War, Fateful Triangle: The U. S., Israel and the Palestinians, Pirates and Emperors, The Culture of Terrorism, and Necessary Illusions.