Manufacturing Reason

Noam Chomsky has written a great deal about how mass media reinforces government, corporate, and nationalistic interests in what Walter Lippmann called in 1922 the "manufacture of consent." Lippmann argued that propaganda's ever increasing power, along with the necessity of specialized knowledge in political decision-making, have made democracy impossible.

Chomsky and co-writer Edward Herman's book "Manufacturing Consent" (And a documentary film "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media") argues that since mass media are now mostly run by huge corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other corporations. The pressure to create a consistently profitable business distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the breadth and depth in which they are reported. This occurs as a consequence of market selection: those who happen to favor the bottom-line over news quality get to play, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become roadkill.

In other words for-profit news agencies that report operationally with concision (that is, less depth and more breadth) tend to survive over those for-profit news organizations that provide both depth and breadth or just in-depth reporting.

Additionally, as we in Iowa get to experience first hand every three to four years, political machines and candidates roll out their talking points aided and abetted by the press. Sadly, other than reporting what other campaigns views are, these sound bites are echoed largely without analysis.

Similarly, it can be rightly argued that those who practice "manufactured dissent" suffer the same fate. That is to say that issue groups like Code Pink, the NRA, MoveOn, and the Heritage Foundation tend to reduce substantive arguments to "framed" messages that present their point of view while leaving out the whole of the story. And it works because, as any person in Congress can tell you, they are inundated by e-petitions, e-mails, and faxes thanks to the efforts of special interest groups. And similarly, the press tends to report their messages without analysis.

Is this a good thing? Perhaps in a world of half-truths, half a truth is better than no truth. But, it can also be reasonably argued that difficult issues, when reduced like this, produce mediocre or worse results.

So, to relate this to the "doing well for people" scope that this blog is about, we the people have to be better students about issues such as global warming, health care, foreign policy and so on. Because for us, neither those who are professional dissenters or corporate reporters ultimately serve in our best interest.

Community Radio, Public Access TV, e-zines, and alternative press are our friends. But we have to use the resources, support them, and, by all means, improve them. We need to have discussions about difficult information and issues rather than have them digested for us. We need to manufacture reason.