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Concept
Manufacturing Consent
Summary
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). The book was honored with the Orwell Award.
A 2002 revision takes account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. A 2009 interview with the authors notes the effects of the internet on the propaganda model.
Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom Herman and Chomsky dedicated the book. The book was greatly inspired by Herman's earlier financial research. Since Herman's contribution to the book was so important, Chomsky insisted on putting Herman's name in front of his name, contrary to the pair’s habit of alphabetic listing. Herman and Chomsky were close friends for fifty years.
Herman was a professor of finance at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chomsky is a linguist and activist scholar, who has written many other books, such as Towards a New Cold War. Before Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988, the two authors had collaborated on the same subject before. Their book Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book about American foreign policy and the media, was published in 1973. The publisher for the book, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Incorporated, was deliberately put out of business after printing 20,000 copies of the book, most of which were destroyed, so the book was not widely known.
According to Chomsky, "most of the book [Manufacturing Consent]" was the work of Edward S. Herman.
Official source
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