Manufacturing Consent Summary

Manufacturing Consent

Edward S. Herman

Do you ever watch the news and ask yourself what the motivations are for a station sharing a particular story? Information should be informative, entertaining, and amusing, but is it always this way?

The mass media has a dark side to it that you may not have thought of before. In addition to entertaining us, these sources also promote certain social norms and behaviors. The government and other people who control the country are more in charge of what you see on the television than you might think.

These are the claims of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Chomsky argues that with an unequal division of wealth and power comes a wildly uneven distribution of stories that favors the upper class. Even though the media boasts objective, trustworthy reports, they are only a puppet of those who are really in charge.