For anyone critical of the media and politics at the turn of the century, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent was essential reading. The book’s “propaganda model” provided a useful framework for understanding how typical news coverage filters out some types of evidence while emphasizing others, ultimately privileging dominant narratives. One key lesson from this analysis was clear: To change the world, we must first change our media.
In the early 2000s, such thinking led me to the media reform movement and to the academic field of communication, where I hoped to learn about the limitations of, and alternatives to, the hyper-commercialized US media system. But I was disheartened to find in graduate school a mix of hostility and indifference toward critical media analysis. Over the years, I found pockets of radical scholarship, especially in the subfield of political economy, that focused on critical and historical analyses of media, but such work remained marginalized. Today, with the rise of new digital monopolies, fear of fascism, and the collapse of journalism, there’s renewed interest in structural analyses of our news and information systems, but too often it’s stripped of radical critique.
Chomsky has long provided a steady radical voice on these matters. I recently spoke to him about the contemporary relevance of his and Herman’s media critique, and why he first turned to media as an important site of struggle. I wondered if his analysis had changed; if anything had surprised him over the decades; and, most importantly, whether he
— source chomsky.info | Aug 13, 2021