Newsletter Numéro 60 3 December 2017
RIP Edward Herman
We Need a “New Manufacturing Consent”
by Matt Taibbi – Rolling
Stone
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=9977
14 Nov 2017 – Edward Herman, the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent,
has died. He was 92. His work has never been more relevant.
Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of
dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of
private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate
propaganda.
Herman’s work was difficult for many
to understand because the nature of the American media, then and now, seemed at
best to be at an arm’s length from, say, the CIA or the State Department. Here is how the book put it:
“It is much more difficult to see a
propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is
absent.”
The basic thesis of Manufacturing
Consent was that propaganda in America is generated through a few key
idiosyncrasies of our (mostly private) system.
One is that getting the whole
population to buy in to a narrative requires the sustained attention of the
greater part of the commercial media, for at least a news cycle or two.
We don’t censor the truth in
America, mostly. What we do instead is ignore it. If a lone reporter wants to
keep banging a drum about something taboo, like contracting corruption in the
military, or atrocities abroad, he or she will a) tend not advance in the
business, and b) not be picked up by other media.
Therefore the only stories that
tended to reach mass audiences were ones in which the basic gist was agreed
upon by the editors and news directors of all or most of the major media
companies.
In virtually all cases this little
mini-oligarchy of media overlords kept the news closely in sync with the
official pronouncements of the U.S. government.
The appearance of dissent was
permitted in op-ed pages, where Democrats and Republicans “debated” things. But
what readers encountered in these places was a highly ritualized, artificially
narrow form of argument kept strictly within a range of acceptable opinions.
Herman and Chomsky stressed the
concept of worthy and unworthy victims. In Manufacturing Consent,
written during the Cold War, the idea was expressed thusly: One Polish priest
murdered behind the Iron Curtain earned about a hundred times
as much coverage as priests shot in Latin America by American-backed
dictatorships.
The Polish priest was the worthy
victim, the Latin American priests unworthy.
So Americans learned to be furious
about atrocities committed in Soviet client states, but blind to almost exactly
similar crimes committed within our own spheres of influence.
The really sad part about the
Herman/Chomsky thesis was that it didn’t rely upon coercion or violence.
Newspapers and TV channels portrayed the world in this America-centric way not
because they were forced to. Mostly, they were just intellectually lazy and
disinterested in the stated mission of their business, i.e., telling the truth.
In fact, media outlets were simply
vehicles for conveying ads, and a consistent and un-troubling view of the
political universe was a prerequisite for selling cars, candy bars, detergent,
etc. Upset people don’t buy stuff. This is why Sunday afternoon broadcasts
featured golf tournaments and not police beatings or reports from cancer wards
near Superfund sites.
The news business was about making
money, and making money back then for big media was easy. So why make a fuss?
As a result, the top executives in
news agencies were people who were inclined to take official sources as gospel.
An additional feature of the business was that the least skeptical reporters
were the ones who were promoted the most quickly. And when they got there,
reporters manning the top posts were encouraged to develop an almost religious
worship of credentialing.
A person with a title, be it someone
from a think tank, a university, or especially a security service organ, was to
be trusted unquestioningly. Meanwhile, outside/dissenting voices were given the
hardcore “skeptical journalist” treatment.
This is how situations like the Iraq
War invasion happened, in defiance of all common sense.
Even though a child could see that
the government’s stated reason for going into Iraq was both insane and a
fiction, virtually everyone in the business jumped into the story with both
feet.
Round the clock, TV sets were full
of current and former generals and/or talking heads from think tanks boosting
the war rationale. Antiwar voices were almost totally excluded.
Within the business, those with
doubts hesitated to say so in public. Even at the editorial level, this was so,
thanks to fear of backlash.
Herman/Chomsky identified that
phenomenon in Manufacturing Consent as “flak” – a policing mechanism
whereby reporters and/or media outlets that stepped out of line could expect to
be denounced by an entire range of establishment voices.
Those voices were usually the same
credentialed “experts” who were accustomed to being worshipped in the normal
course of coverage.
Flak worked. It scared advertisers,
and what scares advertisers scares editors.
In the case of Iraq, fear of being
called unpatriotic, a terrorist-lover or “against the troops” cowed most news
directors or editors with even remote doubts. And when that didn’t work,
networks like MSNBC simply yanked disobedient antiwar voices like Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura.
Through these parallel operations –
the pushing of approved narratives on the one hand and the policing and hiding
of forbidden ones on the other – this seemingly unconnected federation of
competing media companies and establishment spokesfiends
“manufactured” public opinion.
There was no dictum from above, the
way it might have happened in a tinpot dictatorship
or a superpower oligarchy like the Soviet Union.
Public “consent” for policies like
the Iraq invasion was manufactured through a complex series of organic
processes, then kept in place via a mix of powerful
economic and psychological incentives.
Herman was interested in the
phenomenon of how even outright fictions could be sold in a “free” media
system.
In his last piece, from this past
summer, Herman made a list of some of the whoppers the media has foisted on the
public over the years: the depiction of the U.S. not as an invader but as a
defender of South Vietnam against “aggression,” the notion that the Soviets
were behind a papal assassination attempt, the “missile gap” and others.
Herman was a skeptic about the
current Russia news, but that isn’t why his work is relevant today. You can
believe he’s dead wrong on Russia and Trump, and Manufacturing Consent would
still be far more relevant now than it was when he and Chomsky first wrote it.
The main reasons for this have to do
with the structure of the current commercial media. Because of tech companies
like Google and Facebook, it is significantly easier
to “manufacture” consent today than it was before.
A small handful of monopolistic tech
companies like Facebook have life-or-death power over
media companies. They can steer traffic wherever they please simply by tweaking
their algorithms. Firms that don’t themselves create news content wield this
monstrous influence.
Controlling how, where and when you
got the news was how media companies were paid previously. Since those
processes are mostly out of their hands now, news companies no longer control
their own economic fates.
They have become vassals to
essentially unregulated, monopolistic distribution mechanisms like Facebook, who additionally appropriate the lion’s share of
the profits that used to fund things like investigative journalism.
Moreover the policing mechanisms are
far more powerful now. Herman and Chomsky wrote about flak in the era before
social media. Today blowback against dissenting thought is instantaneous and
massive.
Individual reporters are far more
likely to be freaked out about it because Internet trolls are so personal and
can rattle just about anyone. Add the proliferation of fake blowback produced
by oppo firms and troll farms and it’s not an
accident that the overwhelming majority of “legacy media” content stays within
the confines of conventional blue or red rhetoric.
The major difference between then
and now has to do with which narratives are being pushed. When Manufacturing
Consent was written the major problem was that Americans across the entire
political spectrum were being sold a range of myths about the beneficence of
American power and government policy.
Today it is not clear who is
actually dictating to whom. Is the state dictating to the media, or are global
distribution firms dictating the narrative to states?
We can make a few deductions about
the new “manufactured consent.” The thrust of modern media isn’t as simple as
cheerleading for the flag and ignoring atrocities, although we clearly still do that.
There seems also to be a massive
emphasis on political division as a route to profit. Since getting people to
discuss and argue is how companies like Facebook get
paid, driving us toward ever more divisive media is an obvious imperative. But to
what end?
Herman and Chomsky’s work was a
great gift to a generation of thinkers trying to make sense of how power in the
West sold itself to populations. The late Herman should be honored for that
critical contribution he made to understanding American empire.
It’s a shame he never wrote a
sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing
Consent.
_________
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