Yair’s Reviews > Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media > Status Update

"The actual facts were, and remain, of little interest, for the same reason."

-Manufacturing Consent, (pg. 493)

"This classic of colonialist paternalism reflects quite accurately the general mood of the day—as does the refusal to report such trivial matters as the regular U.S.-ARVN attacks on Cambodia, which have largely passed from history in the United States, apart from the dissident literature."

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 456)

"All of this again reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests."

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 430)

"The model is also vindicated by the manner in which Freedom House fulfills its function as a flak machine, attempting to bully the media into a still more thoroughgoing conformity with the propaganda requirements of state policy by methods that are a travesty of honest journalism (let alone scholarship)—all, of course, in the interest of “freedom.”"

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 396)

'This may well explain why the public has apparently been willing to accept the tales about media treachery. But among the educated elites, the explanation may lie elsewhere: in a totalitarian cast of mind that regards even the actual level of media subservience to the state as inadequate and a threat to order and privilege by the “forces of anarchy … on the march.”'

-Manufacturing Consent (pg. 365)

"Nevertheless, let us pursue the narrow question of media coverage of Indochina, bearing in mind that we are now turning to relatively minor matters, having taken note of a central and quite devastating criticism: the media’s pervasive, docile, and unthinking acceptance of a set of patriotic assumptions at such a level as to make further commentary of secondary significance, at best."

Manufacturing Consent (pg. 338)

"Pravda could hardly be more subservient to state demands than Time in its coverage of demonstration elections."

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 236)

"THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS PROVIDE AN EXCELLENT TESTING ground for a propaganda model. Some elections are held in friendly client states to legitimize their rulers and regimes, whereas others are held in disfavored or enemy countries to legitimize their political systems."

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 202)

'The complexities and resort to philosophical inanities about unallocable “violence” are reserved for deaths in the provinces.'

-Manufacturing Consent. (pg. 170)

"As we have seen, the level of attention given to the case in the United States was very great. The quality of coverage was also extremely well designed to score political points, and contrasts sharply with the quality of coverage of unworthy victims."

-Manufacturing Consent (pg. 139)