What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream |
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- Noam Chomsky 1997
The elite media set a framework within which others operate. For some years I used to monitor the
Associated Press. It grinds out a constant flow of news. In the mid afternoon there was a break every day with a "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow's New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you're an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio, and you don't have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don't want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the
quarter-page that you are going to devote to some thing other than local affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories that you put there because that's what the New York Times tells us is what you're supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an editor of a local newspaper you pretty much have to do that, because you don't have much else in the way of resources. If you get out of line and produce stories that the elite press doesn't like,
you're likely to hear about it pretty soon. What happened recently at San Jose Mercury News (i.e. Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series about CIA complicity in the drug trade) is a dramatic example of this. So , there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you're not going ', to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is a reflection of obvious power structures.
The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. "Let them do something else, but don't bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn't serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. 'We' take care of that."
What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations.
Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic,
controlled from above. If you don't like what they are doing, you get out. The major media are part of that system....."Noam Chomsky is a renowned scholar, the founder of the modern science of linguistics, a philosopher, a political and social analyst, a media critic, an author
of more than 70 books, a winner of numerous prizes and awards, and ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities. The above was excerpted from a talk at the Z Media Institute, June 1997. The full text is available in the book Letters from Lexington, 2nd ed. (Paradigm) also from You Are Being Lied To (Disinformation). Used by permission |
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| Manufacturing Consent:
Noam Chomsky and the Media
A documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, world - renowned linguist, intellectual, and political activist.
 Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible - the 1992 film argues that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas of the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination into the history of The New York Time's coverage of
Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky claims exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally.
Until the release of The Corporation (2003), it was the most successful documentary in Canadian history, playing theatrically in over 300 cities around the world; winning 22 awards; appearing in more than 50 international film festivals; and being broadcast in over 30 markets. It has also been translated into a dozen languages.
Highlighting Chomsky's analysis of the media, MANUFACTURING CONSENT focuses on democratic societies where populations not disciplined by force are subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control.
Shocking examples of media deception permeate Chomsky's critique of the forces at work behind the daily news. Chomsky encourages his listeners to extricate themselves from this "web of deceit" by undertaking a course of "intellectual self-defense."
Unless otherwise noted all content has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License. The above is sourced from Wikipedia / Wiktionary - a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia / dictionary the DVD is available from Zeitgeist Video, Netflix, & amazon
Mass Media Analysis
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (more....) |
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