2022-06-23
- Started reading Chomsky’s, “Manufacturing Consent”. Very good so far. Highlighting the extent to which media is massively centralized (highlights that 9 total companies control basically every newspaper, movie studio, TV station, radio station, etc). I didn’t personally think the consolidation had been so extreme, but turns out I guess it has. The main effect Chomsky notes is that there is no serious dissent from standard elite narratives. There is certainly no voice given to anything resembling “the people.” Instead, the people are treated as a bewildered herd, needing to be coralled by “correct ideas” about the way the world is. There is no room for uncertainty in these narratives about who is good and who is bad. And largely the distinction exists to protect/further the interests of the elites, regardless of what the people would do if given a real choice. Chomsky cites several, pretty damning examples of double standards in US media. The book came out in 1988, so the examples
are from the prior couple decades. Noteworthy ones include things like coverage of the Indonesian dictator Suharto. Evidently, Suharto led a massive genocidal purge of political enemies in the 60s. But since the political enemies were (allegedly) communists, the US and its media covered the genocide in a favorable light. Now, important to note here, communism sucks. One of the many reasons Communism sucks is because those regimes seem to regularly do these purges of political enemies. Ultimately, the purges are bad. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the tankies doing them or the forces of capitalism or any other -ism, purges are bad. So, obviously it sucks that the US and mega media cos at the time covered the political genocide of 1 million people as if it was a minor, acceptable, “cost of doing business.” And critically, the media coverage of this political purge differed so wildly from that of other purges mentioned (e.g. vietnam after the war) that it pretty clearly discredits the
coverage of these events by leading US media institutions. So, ok, can’t trust the NY Times. What else is new? Well, I think what’s new is this book challenges me to extend the scope of things where I don’t trust NY Times (or WSJ, or Fox News, or CNN, etc). I already recognized the conflict of interest when it comes to NY Times covering the social problems of FB, so it was easy to ignore their reporting there. But it’s still hard to view other areas of coverage as similarly suspect, particularly coverage of international affairs. Take the Uighur genocide in China. On the one hand, I think the genocide is happening, and the CCP is awful, and coverage of the issue is super important. On the other hand, Chomsky would point out that we are extremely unlikely to get unbiased information on this issue from sources like NY Times or WSJ or Fox News or CNN etc. No matter which major media institution you pick, be it one with a left or right bias, each one has a pro-American-elite bias that
pervades its coverage. So, the coverage about international affairs becomes hard to believe as being informational at all. What else are they going to tell us other than “CCP is bad”? This lack of informational value in international affairs coverage is, of course, a problem that has come up before. It’s well-documented that Vietnam coverage was a total sham. The media tries to spin this as being entirely the fault of the government (“McNamara lied!”), hoping people will ignore that it is, in fact, the job of the media to root out these lies and hold the government accountable. “Well, eventually, the media did do that”, someone might say. And yeah, kind of, but even that standard would force you to recognize that there can be massively long stretches where the media is simply wrong on hugely important issues, yet they will print their stories as if they are almost completely certain that they are true. And they will present uncertainty in a light that favors a narrative that serves
elite US interests. With that in mind, it increasingly looks like these media institutions are not actually serious about “the truth,” they are serious about “controlling the narrative.” People often recognize this reality in media orgs that have a different left vs right political bias than their own personal preference. Chomsky makes a compelling case that this “controlling the narrative goal” in favor or US-elite worldviews is present everywhere, no media org is immune. Furthermore, since all of the major US media orgs have a pro-American-elite bias, you can’t even diversify your news diet to escape the bias, at least when it comes to thing where the elite are united. Diversifying your news sources can maybe help reduce bias on issues where the elite are actually competing (think something like abortion), though even then, it’s likely still an extremely narrow set of options being discussed, but it won’t do anything for issues where elites are united (think something like increasing
military spending). So…yeah. I dunno. Obviously, we shouldn’t trust the government. Also obviously, we shouldn’t trust the people responsible for holding the government accountable. I guess mostly the people to trust are those with real skin in the game (family, friends, etc).
- Note, this was written before Twitter, so not sure what Chomsky thinks about that (presumably it is a big deal, but maybe recent censorship stuff is a reminder that control of the medium is still held by small number). I do think it’s clear that Chomsky would advocate for a media landscape with numerous voices, even if most of those voices are garbage. The reason current media orgs can “manufacture consent” is that there are so few of them that the folks in charge can coordinate effectively to prop up elite narratives for the masses. Adding more sources reduces that ability to coordinate, which reduces the ability to manufacture opinion, which maybe somewhat increases ability for individual people to have their actual opinions represented in major discussions. Whether Twitter/the Internet actually do that is another question (whose answer is “probably no” given the huge centralization of Internet platforms).
Date
June 23, 2022