Manufacturing Consent

In “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky's propaganda model is described as a system in which media is selling a product, in in this case consumers, to the corporations. Due to ownership and/or funding of the media by the government and/or corporations, media present, select, and leave out information with the result of a biased and favorable view toward the corporations and/or the government-- and that there are five filters under which the media can fall under: ownership, the market (of the advertisers), sourcing, flak, and anticommunism. The danger of the propaganda, as expressed by Chomsky in the film, is that the model is essentially elitist and undemocratic in the indoctrination of specific ideology unto the mass.


Stylistically, “Manufacturing Consent” often undermines the ideology as promoted by the news media by placing segments of historic video recordings seconds after Chomsky discusses the specific historic event-- its portrayal in the media, the mass's conception of the event through the media, and the information on the same event that is different from the distorted, left out, or exaggerated version as presented in the media (a good example of this would be the support for war in Cambodia-- participants at the parade in the footage support the whitewashed version of the war and deem it a patriotic act to do so).


One question we might ask is this: is this film on Noam Chomsky itself part of the propaganda model? While Chomsky's propaganda model welcomes different voices and information, the ironic fact that many people, like myself, must have viewed the film from hulu.com, with its advertisement interruptions, suggest that it might be more difficult to get out of the propaganda model than we might think.