Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent revisited | The Listening Post - YouTube
There is an exquisite and oft-quoted moment in an interview between BBC journalist Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky in which Marr asks: "How can you know that I'm self-censoring?".
"I'm not saying you're self censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Wry as ever, Chomsky exposed the slightly delusional pretensions of the journalistic establishment - and not far behind, the complicities of the media industry with political power.
Harsh? Perhaps. True? All too often.
For many of us who work at The Listening Post, Chomsky's ideas on the media in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media have provided us with a guide, full of cautionary tales and ideas that are still controversial to this day.
The book was published in 1988 - a year before the end of the Cold War when it was announced that western liberal democracy had triumphed, heralding the end of ideology, authoritarianism, and propaganda.
In the past 30 years, we have seen the mass communications industry multiply, providing an illusion of choice, echoing the rhetorics of freedom - of press, of expression - but not necessarily yielding the pluralism liberal democracies had promised.
There is an exquisite and oft-quoted moment in an interview between BBC journalist Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky in which Marr asks: "How can you know that I'm self-censoring?".
"I'm not saying you're self censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Wry as ever, Chomsky exposed the slightly delusional pretensions of the journalistic establishment - and not far behind, the complicities of the media industry with political power.
Harsh? Perhaps. True? All too often.
For many of us who work at The Listening Post, Chomsky's ideas on the media in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media have provided us with a guide, full of cautionary tales and ideas that are still controversial to this day.
The book was published in 1988 - a year before the end of the Cold War when it was announced that western liberal democracy had triumphed, heralding the end of ideology, authoritarianism, and propaganda.
In the past 30 years, we have seen the mass communications industry multiply, providing an illusion of choice, echoing the rhetorics of freedom - of press, of expression - but not necessarily yielding the pluralism liberal democracies had promised.