During my Sociology studies, I read this in parallel with ‘Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy’ and ‘Arguments for the Elimination of Television’
What they point to is the false promises of “products” like 𝕏 and the effective cloche they provide in aid of these goals.
It would be a sociologist that would take the time to search up a fancy symbol "𝕏" for a companies' branding.
I can't wait until we achieve complete brand saturation and revert to pictographic communication using only official branding symbols. The ASCII symbols disappear from everyone's keyboards and become ancient glyphs. Only the global elite can afford to spend the time learning this ancient script, but it comes with a powerful benefit. Through the ritual magic of Prompt Engineering, the ancient script unlocks the true power of GPT-11. While us mortals can only communicate vague moods in emoji and receive a symbolic stream of consumer goods and branding in response, those who speak the ancient script have the power of millions of undergraduate essays of varying accuracy.
Curtis Yarvin’s concept of “The Catgedral” extrapolates on this I believe. Beyond the elite media he also identifies the prestigious academic institutions, which consequently are the source of elite media and business power, as a part of the apparatus that determines what’s ok to think.
The observation being that it’s interesting that on subjective things, every prestigious academic institution comes to the same conclusion. And these conclusions are passed onto the elite media which then manufactures consent.
Of course an academic like Chomsky would be blind to this.
It reminds me of AlphaGo not playing for a win by a large margin, unlike humans do. I don't think the system needs to stomp Chomsky to the ground, unlike some totalitarian systems that demand complete subordination. They only need to make sure that more people listen to Tucker Carlson than Noam Chomsky, for which not inviting Chomsky to mainstream TV was so far pretty sufficient.
Tucker Carlson would be closer to the "Flak" than the New York Times though. He has been pushed to the margins by his previous employer Fox, who are more or less a flak machine at least compared to elite media that are taken seriously by policy makers and the academics that shape those policies.
That's a good point. The mass media and elite media really use different language, which is an additional obstacle. They don't seem to be a part of the same structure, and are presented to be at odds.
I am reminded how Chomsky described the 1930s, that working class people were often pretty well-read. The above divide seems to help in maintaining the ignorance.
> Beyond the elite media he also identifies the prestigious academic institutions, which consequently are the source of elite media and business power, as a part of the apparatus that determines what’s ok to think.
These theories seem to start with the assumption that all ideas are equal, and what's 'ok' is arbitrary preference. We are dealing with truth.
High quality media directly check and corroborate facts; they use journalism to systematize delivery of truth. Quality research is about revealing truths - about nature, society, etc., systematizing it via scientific method.
Yes, humans fail all the time at truth, but they succeed all the time too. These institutions do a pretty good job, IMHO, and simultaneously a very flawed job that could be improved.
We are dealing with power, not truth neccessarily. They lie by omission all the time and selectively and arbitrarily determine what is and what is not news. They exist to sell a narrative that is useful to their life support sources. There's some good apples, of course, but by and large they lie constantly because the lies are useful.
> Quality research is about revealing truths - about nature, society, etc., systematizing it via scientific method
Most things can't be systematized via science because they aren't science. They aren't falsifiable. They are in essence opinions.
IME and IMHO that's not reality. People do care about the truth, as well as power, and many other things. They generally are truthful. It's also (enlightened) self interest and we are highly evolved social beings, able to organize on the scale of billions.
The idea that we are only or mostly our worst, most self-destructive instincts and not, for a equally likely example, only our best instincts, is an odd one, but people love to think it these days.
Caring about power yields more power. All people are a mix of all these qualities, but if some qualities help to survive/succeed in an organization, the organization will be lobsided towards these. It doesn't take evil masterminds, just bits of "worse" instincts that get amplified in the dynamics of the organization.
I find it quite apparent in academia too. Academics do care about the truth and such, but to survive in academia you have to "play the game" even when it means being a bit flexible with the truth or other such principles. Or conversely, being too rigorous with principles means you don't usually stay a (paid) academic for long.
It's hard to compete with ideas that generate power. I'm not sure Chomsky has ever fully realize this. His problem has always been he's too academic and doesn't understand human nature or reality very well. Smart guy though.
But going back to the idea of ideas that generate power - that's what is useful. Ideas and concepts that can be used to justify the use of power in some form. Ideas that can be used to "change the world", or more bluntly "exercise power over others". It doesn't mean that every notion that is useful to power is wrong but rather that we should be suspicious of it.
And unfortunately, with the way universities are incentivized today a lot of bad ideas are taken as given because they produce power and are therefore more useful than the ideas that don't. Hence all the "crises", and "injustices", etc.
One thing I've never been able to work out is, if this model were true, how would we ever hear about it? Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? Why would Al Jazeera produce this video and why would YouTube host it? These are all large media companies.
edit: I hope this question doesn't come across as petty or rude. I am a fan of Chomsky and intrigued by his thoughts on society. It's an honest question that I really have a hard time getting past.
Chomsky is listing the filters, but not any countervailing forces. Al Jazeera is owned by people with different motivations than Disney. So they publish different things. But note -- this only reinforces Chomsky's point! It highlights the damage of concentrated ownership. Counting on the "benificence" of oil-sheiks seems like a bad plan for civil society.
Remember too that Manufacturing Consent (1988 and Chomsky's thinking in general) precede mass-internet comms and the globalized infosphere. Mass-comms really did require large capital plants (towers, satellites, cable plants, etc.), and mass-media and big-capital were inseparable. This is less true today for new media. It is more true for the incumbent radio, tv, and newspaper businesses. Those have been concentrated into a very few hands over the last 40 years.
I've not kept up with Chomsky enough to know his current thinking. I'd argue that 2 and 4 are even stronger on the internet. 5 is evergreen. And 4 is now an aspirational lifestyle - the "Influencer".
If you consider that the average person hasn't read a book since high-school, and needs someone on the nightly news to tell them what happened on twitter yesterday, then this STILL hasn't reached "mass media".
You still largely need money to become an influencer (and by becoming an influencer you gain lots of money, and you've probably done so by 'gaming'[*] an algorithm written by an insanely rich corporation). The democratization of social media is an illusion.
[*] really the algorithm is just another media filter that controls who gets through it, talking about "gaming" an algorithm probably has it a bit backwards.
Why would Al Jazeera produce this video? I think that's important to keep in mind as you watch it. The video begins by pointing towards "western media" as the source of problems, which is a pretty advantageous message for a non-western media outlet to send. They suggest that "press freedom" is just a buzzword for how media operates in democracies, which is quite convenient for an outlet owned and funded by a non-democratic country. And why might they have wanted to use an abstract fifth filter instead of the very specific one Chomsky wrote in his book?
There's a nihilistic "the media are liars and everything you read is a lie" take that bounces around the Internet a lot, but I don't think that was Chomsky's original point.
Something doesn't need to be 100% true, in all times and places, to be valuable or essential.
That expectation overlooks the complexity of reality - there may be reasons that Random House, etc. are exceptions, and we just can't explicitly identify and define every complexity. It also can throw away 99% of the value of things. Classical mechanics, in physics, isn't true in all situations, but it's still pretty valuable.
The value to something depends on what we can learn from it, not the flaws we can find, and how well it predicts things. If your expectation is perfection and then the theory doesn't meet it, the problem is with the expectation and not the theory.
>One thing I've never been able to work out is, if this model were true, how would we ever hear about it?
That's like saying "If there's air pollution why are we not all dead?" Nobody said this system has no holes at all - just that this defines the major vectors of news.
>Why would Random House publish the book by Herman and Chomsky? Why would Al Jazeera produce this video and why would YouTube host it? These are all large media companies.
Because this is the general propaganda mechanisms, not absolute control.
Plus it doesn't cost them much. Reading it wont give you power, nor it's directly attached to some cause they actively promote or hurts their profit margins.
If it became a movement, or it was against some of their private interests or those of their sponsors concretely, and not in the abstract, it would be a different story.
2.Each of these institutions brands itself on providing quality information, and in the US we pride ourselves on the first amendment. So the brand hit for censoring isn't worth it.
3. Chomsky is/was tenured and couldn't be fired the same way a journalist could
If you look at manufacturing consent, they make it clear that good stuff can get through media. It is just so much harder, and therefore there is less of it overall. But that doesn't mean nothing can get through.
> If you look at manufacturing consent, they make it clear that good stuff can get through media.
Arguably, the manufacturing only works if 51% or more is generally good stuff. Obviously propaganda outlets don't keep a lot of eyes, e.g. Fox News' viewership has been declining faster than demographics says it should be.
90% can be spot on, entertaining, and wholly or mostly truthful; it's the 10% makes it work.
How much of Fox' decline is due to their occasionally going against Trump, and firing commentators that go beyond even their pale like Tucker Carlson? They forgot their business is reinforcing confirmation bias (as is all mainstream media, to a large extent, just with different demographics).
In this case tenure would work out in Chomsky's favor, and Al Jazeera may as a large media company benefit from signalling that other large media companies are not like itself, by way of providing a costly signal at risk to itself.
YouTube wouldn't care, it prioritizes demonization based on legal fallout. Talking about flak is not a flak topic.
The major players in media need access to policymakers to publish stories, they tend to go along with whatever narrative is being pushed in exchange for this access.
You wouldn't expect Greenwald to have WH press credentials for instance.
I regret to inform you that you are due for your regular re-watching of The Matrix.
You need to leave a relief valve, an opportunity for the malcontents to go express their need for rebellion in a wholly controllable way. They will then dig their own graves.
Why wouldn't we? What are we going to do about it? Nothing. It's just like youtube platforms videos discussing how bad social media is for your mental health. Or oil companies funding 'green' tech. Or a newspaper writing about how bad news is for you.
'News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier'
They are all large media companies controlled by the same group of elites.
In a totalitarian system, the elites carse about what you think. In a dystopian system, the elites don't care.
So random house published herman and chomsky? And? What happened since? It's like food industry being paranoid about people finding out about how sausage is made. People find out. People keep on eating sausage. Heck it's free advertising.
I would assume it’s because he does not have the following to create any real issues. How many views do his videos/other works get compared to someone like Mr Beast or Joe Rogan? It’s that scene in Jurassic park. The general concept of intellectualism is derided by the public (I would argue precisely for the reasons outlined in the post) so it’s particularly necessary to single out chomsky and turn him into a martyr.
The goal, or at least one of the goals, of Manufacturing Consent is to explain how the powerful elite can keep the general population in favor of the status quo without authoritarian measures. If the consent of the population can be manufactured sufficiently enough, then there's no need for authoritarian measures at all.
Suppression is a good way to make ideas more acceptable. Chomsky is allowed to say these things because he's also considered a communist in the common enemy sense.
During the time I spent as a writer, I found media was a power game for people who could afford to play it, and a mortal struggle for those who couldn't. It's a zero sum game masquerading as a positive sum art and craft. In short, avoid.
Learn to see the opportunity to produce things others want, make your own money, then run silent and deep until you or your kids can afford to be players, and not merely pieces.
The discourse from establishment Washington over the past month vis-a-vis the Ukraine has been the same as Chomsky's was then. No one is talking about pushing Russia out of Crimea and Donetsk any more.
This letter is addressed to Chomsky back then, but he has the same position as most of Washington DC now.
There is also good series on YT from "Carefree Wandering" (Hans-Georg Moeller) on media theory in general, which also discusses Chomsky perspective in one of the videos.
Chomsky's analysis of society, and the media, is common across radicals of all political persuasions. They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular, despite being "obvious" -- so you have false consciousness (marx), manufactured consent (chomsky), class envy (ayn rand), etc.
What Chomsky leaves out from his analysis is that he himself exists: a member of the elite, central to vast amounts of elite discourse. His ideas aren't marginal and indeed, in many ways, mainstream.
Radicals are, generally, rationalists -- starting theory-first. But in matters as complex as society, you need to be an empiricist.
If you study 'popular opinion', consent, etc. as an empiricist you do not find these categories: elite, media, etc. Rather there are shifting groups of people, each with their own interests, engaged in a competition to have their interests realised.
When fox news called Arizona their viewers left them -- so fox jumped on election denial precipitating events which led to Jan 6th. What is the analysis here, say?
Well chomsky would always 'find his enemies' in the elite: trump down to his base. Whilst this analysis is partly correct, it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him. Rather than any prior 'political elite'.
The conspiratorial analyses of radicals always ends up with 'and this is why people don't subscribe to my view of the world' -- it is itself a political project to 'manufacture ideological consent' to their own world view. A mechanism they fail to notice.
A scientist in these matters has to have basically no political project whatsoever, and not bend their empirical analysis towards their status and away from the status of others. And indeed: how many political scientists are there, by this definition? nearly none.
There are, in fact, many establishments that are frighteningly efficient at devoting time, money and effort into manipulating people. But those establishments are ultimately guided by people, too. And those people are fallible creatures, just as prone to vagaries of ideological fashion and lapses in rational thought as those who ushered the events of January 6. Even the juggernauts make missteps. It does not diminish the empiricism of Chomsky's ideas.
The phenomenon you describe transcends notions of class, race, and and so on: over lifetime timescales, a group of people is a chaotic and unpredictable system, replete with knock on effects, where any actor or interest, no matter how fringe, has the potential to dominate. And while one can apply basic sociological principles to anticipate some short-term behaviors, it stands to reason that no amount of cold calculation or meticulous planning (by governments, media, elites, or otherwise) is immune to the simple fact that the course of any given organization is extremely difficult to consistently predict.
The problem with chomsky's model is how it manipulates the landscape of our analysis, how it introduces paranoia into our perception of the media.
This is, I think, a serious pathology and a serious flaw -- though, for Chomsky, it's the mood he wants you to be in.. since he has a bridge to sell you.
A real political science here has to explicitly engage with this chaos -- has to model society as the irreducibly complex system that it is. Theories here arent neutral: they modify the very thing being described.
Ok. That still counts. I disagree, but if you in fact read his work then you are totally entitled to that opinion. I was prepared to call you out for having not read it, though.
"When fox news called Arizona their viewers left them -- so fox jumped on election denial precipitating events which led to Jan 6th. What is the analysis here, say?"
From the first filter in the article: Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger conglomerates. Their end game? Profit. And so it’s in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit. Naturally, critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.
"it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him."
2015/2016 Trump was a ratings goldmine. See point #1 about media profits.
Yes, but chomsky's analysis of "profit" is as this sort of christian evil. The profit motive in this case is to give non-elite a determining factor in what they see.
You see how the profit motive is in many cases, and in this case, a democratic force?
People just want to believe that humans are far more exceptional than we really are. These theories rest on the assumption that this 'elite' can predict the future. That there is no randomness in the world. That they are so smart and capable that they can just manipulate everyone. The truth is -- the individuals which make up the elite are just as clueless as everyone else. Furthermore, majority of them behave with good intentions. It is no surprise that no one really knows who represents the "elite". Once you dig deeper into the personality of each individual, you realise that they are just normal people. Often very selfish, but not much different from average Joe.
The problems that we see and blame the elite, god, what ever for, are due to systems we have created. Institutions, culture, feedback loops; everything that exists when large groups of individuals exist together.
Chomsky is quite explicit that this is not due to any big conspiracy, but something that arises from how different interests align. It's sort of an evolutionary process, but this is (too) often stated as intentional agents behaving with some clear "conspiratory" goal.
E.g. on journalists: "I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Isn't it quite an extraordinary claim that e.g. ad-funded media would be independent from their customers (the buyers of the ads)? Ad-funded media that doesn't please the ad buyers doesn't stay in business for long. This is discussed in Manufactuing Consent at length and the discussion doesn't resort to any conspiracies.
> They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular
Actually what Chomsky notes is how the idea of "radical" laws such as that a person can't be kicked off their health plan if they develop cancer are not unpopular, but wildly popular with the public in polls. Nonetheless in the decades prior to Obamacare, despite its popularity, due to institutional reasons it did not become law.
> the existence of Trump in the first place: his base chose him
Chomsky said early on Trump support came mostly from the base, and the power structure did not want him.
You're knocking down a straw man - inventing things Chomsky did not say, attributing them to him, then condemning him for words you put in his mouth, when he often said the opposite.
I dont think we have a way to determine popularity as easily as you suggest. Brexit was popular: 52% said yes, but of those many would not pay any money at all to see it through. So, its popular if its free. Many things are.
This is often the implied context around this polling: do you want better services and lower taxes? Yes. Yes, of course.
The issue for america, in the case of universal healthcare, is that it would dramatically increase the tax burden and worsen healthcare for the middle/upper-middle. How many are so noble when it comes to this double-whammy? Few.
On paper, people will spend other people's money with glee. In practice, politics expresses something ideologues can never really tolerate: that society is often getting what it wants.
Or, more precisely, that the social ecology is both healthy and imperfect. That society may not get what it wants in some sense, but not for any malignant reason.
The ideologue always has to locate the failure to reach the ideal with some flaw in people, in the system. They cannot brook that through ordinary, indeed healthy, political process can come non-ideal outocmes.
A close look at the political system here in the U.S. exposes many significant ways in which policy is protected from voter intent: Electoral college, gerrymandered districting, a first-past-the-post system that is hostile to third parties (the main parties control the national debate process, for example). It is indeed possible for a policy to be widely popular with the voting public, but NOT on the ballot in any meaningful way. This is without even dipping into the fear-mongering toward more egalitarian policies in healthcare, taxation, workers rights, etc.
Yes, but can you make the defence of the converse?
Suppose that (democratic) minorities need a little extra weight -- then you'd need an electoral college?
Suppose the 'dripping fear-mongering' is a dislocation of a certain other emotion: discontent, pershaps? disagreement?
Suppose you make a defence that the situation is indeed a healthy one. What would you say then?
I am not saying it is -- but to get beyond this ideological analysis we need to engage with, say, 'the horror of the health of policitics' -- that the thing we most dispise may well be a symptom of what we, ourselves, prescribe
>Chomsky's analysis of society, and the media, is common across radicals of all political persuasions. They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular, despite being "obvious" -- so you have false consciousness (marx), manufactured consent (chomsky), class envy (ayn rand), etc.
There is a difference between "people don't agree with me, it must be a conspiracy!" and "I see people reliably making choices that go against their self-interest" there are likely other factors manipulating them based on those factors own self-interest.
>Well chomsky would always 'find his enemies' in the elite: trump down to his base. Whilst this analysis is partly correct, it doesn't explain the existence of trump in the first place: his base chose him. Rather than any prior 'political elite'.
Trump's base chose him... from a sample of one. Whether by design or happenstance, Trump's political shock-jocking drew eyeballs to the media covering him and got him vastly outsized mindshare by doing so. And the same thing is happening again right now as most media outlets dwell on every single outrageous thing he says, which helps Trump by making it more difficult for any casual voter to see the underlying pattern of fraud, failure, and severe personality disorder.
What happens to our analysis if we throw away the idea of manipulation all togehrer? or perhaps, better, say: there is only manipulation.
That Chomsky manipulates when he points out the manipulation of others; and what we care about is that we're not successful in our manipulations.
By localising this notion of 'manipulation' to an 'elite' he creates a paranoid mood of analysis -- rather, manipulation is democratic; and as far as we're in trouble in politics, it's often because of how democratic manipulation turns out to be.
Yes, people influence each other, even just by talking or writing or moving.
No, this is should not be conflated with teams of media&communications experts spending thousands of man-hours on individual influence campaigns that have been focus-grouped to have precise impact.
I get your point, but I think there is a lot of empirical support for 5 filters.
From a leftist perspective, there is something to your critique, I would say some of the hallucinations of the right-wing Trumpers far overtook what the mass media came up with using those filters. For example, anti-vaccines or stolen elections.
To say Chomsky and Herman's media theory lacks empirical evidence and that every political theory held by (what western liberals consider as) "radicals" is the same, just reeks of neoliberal depolitization. Its the ultimate end-of-politics style argument to end all arguments, the little bit of actual political discourse left in western neoliberal societies is nothing but shunned and marginalized.
The same vapid ideology that always claims to be free of ideology and that underpinned the culture of the Obama white house that brought us Trump in the first place. Not to mention the absolute havoc it wrought in the, for the lack of a better word, global south.
You do realize that all of the people you dismissed as radicals -- Marx et al. -- more or less claimed the same thing? That they had a scientific or objective approach to history/politics/economics?
A swirling glass of coffee isnt subject to 'coffee-bean materialism' let alone the morass of history.
What science teaches us, of late, is the radical limits of science. Any prognostictor of society, coming along, and 'reading its temperature' is automatically a fraud.
Marx gets a pass. My view is that if marx had lived long eough, he'd be here today as a sceptical capitalist, long beyond the habit of prediction.
