Dune (all 6)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

Manufacturing Consent

The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

If This Is a Man, Primo Levi

Light, M. John Harrison

Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent decades ago.

Read, you fools!

I'm as anti-Trump as it gets, but the idea that NYT or WSJ are bastions of reputable journalism is ridiculous.

See, for example, the list of controversies associated with the output of Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman.

This is already well understood, and has been a conscious science since at least the turn of the century. See Edward Bernays, and Manufacturing Consent

Various works by many of these individuals: https://freedom.press/about/board/

It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing, and those who don't care wouldn't read the book.

For the record, I haven't read the book.

In many countries, the state media is more accurate and less partisan than the corporate media. Australia and the US are both good examples of this.

    “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

Manufacturing Consent is one of the most important works of the 20th century. You'll never read the news the same way again.

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.

Lippmann - Public Opinion

Bernays - The Engineering of Consent

Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent

― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988)

This is a fairytale. Chomsky and Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent 30 years ago where they popped that bubble.

It's been 10+ years since I've read chapter 1 of Manufacturing Consent, but IIRC the basic argument is that:

- Media companies are the way they are because they're funded by advertising.

- Media companies have an oligopoly because they are allowed to fund themselves via advertising, and advertising has monopolies of scale.

> you note the high concentration of media creation, but don't speak to the even higher concentration of media distribution, which likely has its own influence on what is created.

That's a good point. The fact that media companies own less of their own distribution is probably the biggest thing that's changed since Manufacturing Consent was originally published, so now institutional incentives need to be considered across two different dimensions.

> "If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were dictators in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." -Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent

But of course, you probably already do understand this and are just willfully ignorant.

> Shame is a tool for fixing shitlords or, if they are unfixable, rendering them powerless.

This has told me pretty much everything I need to know about your viewpoint. You're a bully and you relish silencing opinions you don't agree with, while thinking you hold some kind of moral high ground. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.

The differences of opinion between different critters inside the Washington DC alternate-reality bubble are greatly magnified by how hard they pretend to fight over them.

They did take it seriously. They thought that they were manufacturing the correct consent. (To be fair, their major disagreement with Chomsky was over what consent to manufacture and they're not as far from apart as Chomsky would have you believe. Compare Candidate Obama with President Obama.)

It'd also a bit rich to be cursing at "the Media" for lying as the Executive and his most friendly media outlets just got done trying to play off the global pandemic as a liberal conspiracy nat CPAC.

If you do "Look inside this book" and then "excerpt," it explains it in the first few pages of the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econom...

So Google is releasing news to news outlets and asks for NDAs? Then they threaten to sue for NDA violations. I read it as Google is using NDAs to control and force only positive "news" articles. If article is painting them in a positive light, let it slide, if it is not, threaten to sue. Did I misunderstand it? Cause that sounds pretty sneaky.

> But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants."

Very true. These systems of incentives and constraints is what Chomsky and Herman's book Manufacturing Consent is about. Highly recommended reading. Though in this case (if I read it correctly) it is not really that subtle but more of a clearcut Politburo-style "news" control.

A very strong input into my book choices is reading the ‘classics’ in various domains. I will make frequent use of “Top 100 X books in Y” and “best X book of all time” queries.

I very much subscribe to the idea that selected books form a cultural and intellectual endowment of society to its members. Reading these selected books allows me to competently participate in society, as so much of our communication, institutional structure, and culture is downstream of these works. Examples of such works would be Shakespeare, Dickens, Silent Spring, The Intelligent Investor, Manufacturing Consent, Plato’s Republic.

Very good point. I think anyone interested in how "Free" press is used and how un-free it usually is, should read Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Hate them or love them, they provide a very good examples that are documented of "free" media bias.

My favorite example is CNN recently. I think they at some point dropped the pretense and sunk to levels lower than what Fox has been considered. My favorite recent example is of course Chris Cuomo from CNN who said "...it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us." That is such a brilliant example of what is happening.

The only question there to ask is why be so blatant and desperate about censorship. And I think the answer is because they got desperate. They realized they lost control.

As you say, and Snowden showed US govt has been using Tweeter and other such thing to control and conduct various operations. I am guessing the Arab Spring is a good recent example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHa6NflkW3Y

I think there are some sources where it is defined in a more rigorous manner, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent book is one example I like. They tried as much as possible to document bias in reporting for similar instances in corporate controlled media in US. There are a series of well documented cases.

In conversation, I agree, the term "bias" when it comes to news means "doesn't say things I like"

> North Korea's news is an extreme example of being laser-focused on inane activities of the leader and routine diplomacy, to the complete exclusion of anything about the daily life of civilians.

North Korean model is a more distilled and purified version, obviously to a ridiculous level.

But you brought a good point that in some domains like entertainment, weather, non-political stuff, the news are still there. There is no payoff or threat, it does get through.

Another thing I noticed that foreign news cover stuff better if they don't have a stake in it - like say Al Jazeera talking about South America for example.

After crying and being distraught for an hour or two, a glimmer of hope arose - after-hours and international stock market was down. And suddenly their demeanor changed, there was a chance again of a tiny victory. They were predicting disaster with the same certainty as they predicted Hillary winning. There was talk of everyone's accounts being wiped out, a lot of "we told you" and so on.

And of course next day stocks went right up and nothing happened.

I just liked it because right after talking how they mispredicted the election so badly, they turned around and predicted something else, which again was quickly shown to be false.

So I do recommend watching the popular news channels, they are a pretty good source of entertainment. Read Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky and it becomes even funnier.

So, with the book in front of me, I will quote the one statement that has everybody's dicks hard for hating Chomsky: "The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990's, as the table suggests." So, without reading the book, you would think he's talking about worthy and unworthy the way that we normally mean it. However, he munificently describes the difference: "Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found 'worthy' and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage that those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly 'unworthy'."

But, it's a lot easier for all of you with single digit IQ's to look up secondary-source material like Wikipedia which is essentially a mashup of opinions and has never been considered a reliable academic medium. No book or publication can ever be sourced by Wikipedia yet you all do this all day long.

Manufacturing Consent is not an easy read, but if you would actually read the entire thing you would understand that he never even closely supported Pol Pot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

How to Read a Book (Adler)

World Order (Kissinger)

Der Grundrisse (Marx)

The Grand Chessboard (Brzezinski)

Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky)

Gulag Archipelago (Solhenitzyn)

On War (Clausewitz)

The Hidden Persuaders (Packard)

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)

The Strategy of Desire (Dichter)

Skills acquired: intentional syntopical reading, prediction of geopolitical hinge points, and identification of absent context in media... I'm always looking for another book to read.

Why are you taking the opinion of someone concerning what a book says if that book is unreadable? Clearly there must be something must be wrong either in your ability or in their confidence.

> Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky.

Society of the Spectacle and Manufacturing Consent don't cover the same material. It's a good book recommendation, but Society of the Spectacle is effectively a dissection of a heavily commoditized society, whereas Manufacturing Consent concerns dissecting the current state of media.

Talent in one area doesn't translate to the same level of talent in other areas. For instance, Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling, called "one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time" by New Scientist, promoted high-dose vitamin C as a cancer treatment long after it had been discredited (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research...).

Also, IIRC, Chomsky's contributions to linguistics are somewhat controversial, and I've read that his lock on the field may have set it back by decades.

I maintain that Adam Curtis, Nassem Taleb and Manufacturing Consent are on a subject in which it's impossible to not be a teeny bit paranoid ( Bernays and propaganda/advertising ) but yes, Chomsky is in general just scholarly. This being said, his work does involve descriptions of systems in which he believes people abuse power.

I've been rereading McLuhan, Postman, Huxley, etc.

Manufacturing Consent is the most directly applicable to understanding social media. With at least two updates to the thesis.

#1

The outrage machine is fueled by advertising, right? What's new is the motivating control (choice) moved from the advertiser's intent to the algorithmic recommenders.

#2

Third parties learned to effectively manipulate the algorithmic recommenders. So whereas before the gatekeepers acted as a great filter, third parties are now able to command attention and drive narratives.

--

Forgive me for stumbling over my descriptions. I'm just now trying to write out my notions. And I don't think any of this is "new". Just that with the new medium upsetting the old constraints and balances, different parts of the ecosystem are more impactful.

1. The first book I read that changed my view of my own mind, that is, taught me to "think about thinking", was Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I truly felt like my view of myself and the world I live in changed dramatically.

2. The second book that had a huge impact on me was Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.

3. The third book has to be The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Alexander Solzhenitsyn (the abridged version by Edward E Ericson, Jr). When I mention this book, I meet a lot of people instantly debating the death toll numbers presented by Solzhenitsyn, but for me, the main point of the book is about complicity in the context of the Stalinist regime and complicity in evildoing more generally.

Agreed, but I'd suggest that that state would (at least often) be better than the current state of affairs, where most people outsource the formation of opinions to various third parties. This is how we get things like the Iraq war, or anti-vaxxers.

> Also, many times a "proof" is inappropriate or just fundamentally unproduceable, but we are still required to engage with the content and that content could still be valuable and 'true'.

100% agree. And yet, look how many genuinely intelligent people on HN hold very strong conclusions on topics that are unprovable, with no sense of uncertainty.

> I've studied epistemology in some undergraduate philosophy classes and I've generally found it much less useful than say the reasonably complete theory of media provided by Manufacturing Consent (though my study of epistemology likely helped me understand that book).

Expressing ideas in narrative form is often an easier way to communicate as it's easier to conceptualize when it's put in relatable examples. One of the most useful ideas I think could improve the world is that there aren't only two two states of knowledge, True or False, but also (at least) one additional: Unknown. Of course, everyone will gladly admit this in a thread about philosophy, but move to a thread on politics, and watch that knowledge vanish.

> If I wasn't knowledgeable about AI at all, what would I do with a "proof" if it was given to me?

Two (there are others) options are: outsource your opinion to a third party, or remain undecided. Which one is preferable depends on the situation.

There are two glaring omissions from this article. First is any mention of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent [1], which the author spends a lot of time loosely recapitulating. The other is a lack of sensitivity to the Boomers and the (non-geek) Gen Xers that were simply not exposed to online anything and so do not have immunity, and they generally don't have a good feel for dealing with modern information systems.

The upshot is that I think this is a transient, but because of better health outcomes for the elderly, it's gonna be a long and painful one, because easily manipulated Boomers are going to be voting for a long, long time.

The problem is largely Fox News. Fox has a strangle-hold on the older minds and gives cover and support to the online insanity, specifically because it's format isn't the news, it's a news walk-through (like a game walk-through), which makes you feel like you're good at consuming the news, feel like you have the right opinions, all while saving you the trouble of actually having to think.

The solution, I'm sorry to say, is not teaching critical thinking, or appealing to better emotions, but rather an equal-and-opposite channel: a news walk-through with the same emotional profile, but with opposite opinions to Fox.

With luck, such a channel would become equally popular and cancel out the Fox effect, and leave the actual political decision-making to the critical thinkers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

I think it is fair to say the clarion call of "Fake News" has been around longer than some people think and spans across the political spectrum. In fact, when I hear people insist that CNN or some other mass-media outlets are the cure for alt-right and/or Donald Trump, I wonder if they remember the time not so long ago where they were considered the prime enemies of the left.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral

Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness works, this time through a work of fiction

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - strongly influenced my beliefs about political systems

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - changed how I thought about animal behavior and what living things do

Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig - strongly influenced my beliefs about US government

Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky - made me rethink my view of the media and news

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.

"Manufacture of consent" is the Walter Lippman term they named the book after.

The numbers show that suffering news organizations like the NYT were resuscitated with massive subscriptions since 2016. MSNBC and the Washington Post might as well be "The Trump Post" and "MS Trump NBC" because it's all they talked about. Why wouldn't they, if it poured eyeballs into their bottom lines.

The media dumbed us down LONG before Silicon Valley, Trump and the rest of the nightmare of the past years. Yes, algorithms made it worse.

No, the popular (as in, seemingly upvoted) analyses here read like the world began four (or was it twelve) years ago and takes place in the Bay Area and Seattle.

Some recommended reading material: Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, which covers these issues back in the 90's, Matt Taibbi, a media critic, on YouTube "Rising" from The Hill, Useful Idiots podcast, and if you don't mind salivation and rants, Glenn Greenwald.

It sounds like Manufacturing Consent has an interesting thesis. I would like to read more about it but preferably from someone more readable, more scholarly, and less prone to hyperbole and unsupported claims.

In fact it reviews the very case of East Timor. It compares the near total silence of coverage of that (Indonesia's brutal dictator was an ally) to the coverage of the Communist Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, which was extensive and impassioned.

They discuss a few simple mechanisms that help explain how this bias happens in our otherwise democratic society, which they call the Propaganda Model.[2] A key factor is that major media is funded by advertising, which imparts a kind of natural selection for viewpoints that favor the class interests of the business elite (which extends to foreign policy that favors a powerful American state). So by the time you get hired as a reporter for major media, you've already been selected. You don't have to be told to do the right thing, because you already believe what you're doing to be right.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

This old BBC interview with Noam Chomsky about the topic is also illuminating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow

While such flak attacks aren't always centralized (sometimes there are Fox-News-style "talking points", but often it's an emergent media consensus with no clear ringleader), de-platforming is an even more distributed phenomenon, where the Two-Minutes-Hate du jour can have a viral, snow-balling character. Don't dare speak up against it, lest your head be next on the chopping block.

Without having read the linked book, I wonder how well the strategies would back-port to surviving flak from the traditional media, who still wield outsized influence over which opinions should be considered acceptable, which candidates are "electable", etc. The message discipline in both the MSM and Cancel Culture is frankly impressive: when the same simple story is repeated consistently, whether via sound bites or memes, it tends to stick; and the payload always carries enough emotional charge to bypass all nuance and intellectual charity. "What I tell you three times is true."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model#Flak

First, you're projecting.

Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".

Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.

> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.

This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.

The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.

And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.

Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.

You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.

Because we live in this fantasy land of the [dead] 'American Dream', where if you work hard, absolutely bust your ass and kill yourself for 70 years, you'll get to be Jeff Bezos too. If you're complaining about your job, just get a new one, or pull your boot straps up and accept it, it's that easy. We're constantly told to suck it up and accept it. We're constantly told that these businesses are job creators and should be praised for it and when we criticize them, it's not their fault, it's the workers. We don't criticize because we can lose our job and it's extremely easy to get into homelessness now, or default on the enormous amounts of credit everyone has. The propaganda and indoctrination start from birth and is built into society. The atmosphere changed from workers having control, to businesses having full control. Businesses can't exist without workers, so workers should have control. Anyone who says workers shouldn't have control is a shareholder or business owner.

To change things will take a lot of work, and possibly a major fast economic decline. People have ignored the economic decline of the working class since the late 60's, early 70's. Mainstream media and newspapers work to suppress any workers movements and tell you how great everything is (Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent goes over how this works).

For a while Fox was the best for that. Really good entertainment with all the stupidity and ridiculousness so it was kind of interesting. Then during the election cycle CNN, NYT, and other major ones joined the ranks. I will always remember the "Reading these document is illegal, it is different for us, the media, so come to use for interpretation". That for me exemplified the new low the mass media has sunk to recently.

It is of course useful to re-read Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky and keep that in mind then news makes a lot more sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AnB8MuQ6DU

Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

What do you even mean by conservative? Liberal?

You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives. The USA is a liberal nation by definition, for example 'The separation of church and state' and your 'right to bare arms, in a well regulated malitia'

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> ... the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.

I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch.

The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views.

If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's".

There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument.

Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later.

My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it".

I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).

Big mistake. Note the difference in publishing dates. References in Manufacturing Consent are backed up by things like "column inches per unit time in the New York Times." Also note that he is not the only author of _Manufacturing Consent_.

You remind me of an old USENET poster who used the logic: "I didn't read X by author, but I read Y, and it sucked, therefore X must suck."

Sorry, but that only has a passing resemblance to real logic.

I like media in general and thinking how it is used to control and manipulate people. Especially the idea of the illusion of freedom. I've always recommended Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky.

That analyzes how corporatist media is used to manipulate and control public opinion, and I think at not time has it been truer than in the last election cycle. CNN's Cuomo "these documents are illegal to look at, let us interpret them for you" is such a wonderful example of it. I love it. (sorry everyone, I've mentioned that multiple times).

There is a new twist here and that is social media. I wonder what they'd have to say about that.

No conspiracy necessary.

He investigates a number of "filters," or ways in which reporting is distorted. For example there's a massive disparity in sources. The US military and corporate America spend vast sums of money and manpower contributing stories and source information that media companies depend on. Another is advertising: newspapers that are not advertiser-funded are much less profitable, and therefore more expensive, and therefore suffer in distribution. Etc.

I think there are five in total. Then for each filter, he'll go through countless examples. It's actually quite fascinating.

With regard to specific events, I believe he talks about both the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre. IIRC he builds a compelling case for how the powers that be were themselves incentivized to see the end of the Vietnam war.

As for Waxman, I don't recall reading in her story that she said her editor was the one who met with Weinstein, so it doesn't surprise me that he denies it was him. It also doesn't seem inconsistent with her story that they'd fund her, a reporter, to do reporting, given that (according to her) they weren't against the story until after it was done.

Of course it's entirely possible that she's lying and she made the whole thing up. I'm not a mind reader. But that's missing the point. Chomsky's case doesn't rest on a single story any more than it rests on a conspiracy theory. It doesn't require there to be airtight 100% successful manipulation of the news.

Rather, it's a case built on the back of consistent and sustained bias in favor of the government, advertisers, and sources, with hundreds of examples and troves of data.

Someone pointed Chomsky to me. I read some. I think it was Failed State or Manufacturing Consent. And thought, well, surely this is all liberal commy bullshit. Except for one little problem -- Chomsky seemed to have thorough references and footnotes, with which it was very hard to argue.

Stuff like "Well those countries hates because of our freedoms", a common slogan, kind of ingrained in many people's minds by now. Well it turns out that that isn't the case. Even results from National Security Council' finding show that (Many hate us because we installed and supported brutal dictators and suppressed locally elected governments). That's just one silly example.

Or, for example, assumption about how we have free media who regularly reports objective and informative news as opposed to media, that is heavily biased. Then Manufacturing Consent carefully dissects that and presents a different picture. I read that not wanting it to be true, however Chomsky has this nasty habit of providing good references for his points, not accepting them would be intellectually dishonest.

I'm not familiar with Australian politics, but as for the others, what do you mean? We have had both liberal and conservative governments the last 30-40 years. This, again, has little to do with the mainstream culture, which was my original point.

As for explaining to you why neoliberalism has triumphed, well I recommend that you start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

>Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

Yes, and it had quite an effect on me when I was in college, and utterly ignorant of history. A lot has changed now, and while much of the book is still good, Chomsky has lost his credibility as a cultural critic following the embarrassment of his analyses about a few corners of the world...:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO1JkjbzvPw

Not to mention the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge situation, which should have tipped me off earlier. But I was naive then.

>You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives....

I understand well what the words mean, friend-o.

The reality is we the people do have very considerable control. An additional reality is we the people are currently very distracted and being messaged to on a near constant basis.

Our effective control is at a low ebb right now. That's due to what I just wrote, plus money in politics, and that same money working consolidated media. (Reagan Fairness Doctrine Repeal; Clinton Telecoms Act of 1996)

You aren't wrong, but neither is the parent commenter!

The civil rights movement is the most immune to these effects as social issues tend to be least impacted by money particularly as big business realizes it's best for business when people get along. And it helps that there are people in executive positions right now who are directly impacted by shit social policy.

Progressives, and for purposes of discussion here, are people who are socially liberal and economically left, are building people powered politics as you read this. That's knocking on doors, holding events, messaging directly, largely avoiding big media, and that's largely due to the fact that big media sees the economic left focus as a potential cost and risk.

(as they should, but that does not mean some change is not warranted --many feel it is, but I digress here)

Manufacturing Consent --Chomskey is a great reference to understand the basic dynamics in play. You probably have read it too. It's here for passers by as much as anything else.

Democracy is largely functional, but it's noisy, and the noise is getting in the way of what would otherwise be a respectable state of affairs.

All of us know a gay person. All of us know a woman. All of us know a child.

These things do matter. While some of us, and this includes me, are in the pocket so to speak, can choose to largely ignore all this stuff, we do so at our friends, peers, future leaders, loved ones potential and personal cost and risk.

That's the argument anyway.

That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky_bibliography

He's no quack.

As a contrast, then there is a interview with Assange from a while back. It was immediately confrontational. He didn't have a chance to present his views or what the organization stands for, talk about "global persistent boogeymen", none of that. Reporter zoomed in on the rape (please, true or false?). And that's that. Due to the constraints and rules these agencies operate under and comparing the two approaches it is funny how similar the external effects to that of a state run propaganda agency. It is like having RT report on Putin pretty much.

John Miller might as well be a thawed out frozen sea bass and this piece might as well be a "released by NSA" PR piece. I would laugh normally as it is pretty funny, but this stopped being funny a while back, now it is just scary.

> It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

The advent of the Internet has rocked the "mass communication media" and exposed their "system-supportive propaganda function" in a way that is pretty hard to counter. It's a case of "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"

> a World War I song that rose to popularity after the war had ended. The lyrics highlight concern that American soldiers from rural environments would not want to return to farm life after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_o...

He's both a journalist and part of elite society (see his salary, events he attends, social circles/connections etc.) He risked nothing: His defence, as I stated in my comment, is the existence of other publishers whom he uses as actors who forced his hand and made the Guardian's publishing harmless in terms of disclosure.

> The Guardian has a renowned history of liberal investigative journalism

That's what every newspaper claims but it isn't true. See "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky.

> so I struggle to understand where you gain the insight to claim Rusbridger 'would have been loath to sign off' the Snowden leaks.

It is a straightforward application of common sense that is supported by critical media analysis and nearly tautological: Powerful organizations are powerful. The government has a great deal of influence on the Guardian and those who work there. Opposing the government in a serious way typically results in hardship while supporting them yields benefits. You still have to maintain the appearance of seriously challenging power so that people buy your paper but you can go far without actually having to do much of it.

The only reason they got away with it this time is they can claim that they were "forced" by the fact that other newspapers also published and that their publishing wouldn't have been a factor in whether the material was disclosed.

> which also partnered with Wikileaks around the time of 'Collateral Murder' etc.

Same situation with multiple publishers. Even in that case they redacted names of elite, public individuals, claiming it was to protect themselves from libel allegations.

> There are two false dichotomies...

I never made either claim. Surely Bernstein should praise Snowden and Greenwald to the extent he has praised Rusbridger and before he praises Rusbridger? And competition is not the only factor but when competition for a particularly story exists it both forces a publisher's hand and protects them: They look foolish if they don't publish because somebody else will and they can claim their publication made no difference because someone else is going to publish anyway. In fact this might be one of the few reliable ways to pressure publishers to actually publish sensitive material: Leakers should give material to several news organizations in different countries and tell them so without disclosing the names of those organizations.

I also fail to see why news-based entertainment shows (as is my understanding of one of the programmes mentioned) are any less valid a target for propaganda analysis. Do you believe people cannot be influenced by an entertainment programme? If not, why would such an analysis hold little 'value for the reader'?

I feel you are taking his points far too literally to be relevant in any real-world situation, even if OP's assertions were overly-emotive hyperbole. Nor are you providing much (relevant) value here, IMO - it's not enough to counter criticism of the US with complaints of "America-bashing" unless you say why the criticism is invalid.

As for the propaganda definition you provided (which is a good one), it states the purpose of the disseminations is to change people's opinions. Now you can do that with just plain releasing facts and information (e.g. Wikileaks cables) but it's disingenuous to downplay the role of delivering information by whatever means necessary to produce a specific effect. Propaganda that is 100% factual and non-misleading is called 'facts'.

You would be far better off reading Chomsky's own take on it Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, or a documentary like Century Of The Self.

"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

What we're seeing is the system reasserting itself.

Dear YC: I wholeheartedly support this and strongly recommend these books as required reading for anyone seeking to change how media works in our society.

1. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky & Ed Herman[1]

2. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty by Alex Carey[2]

I realize these have an "anti-corporate" bent to them but they are truly good analyses and well worth reading with at the very least a critical eye. As Carey documents, it is the corporate sector that has developed much of the modern tools of manipulating mass opinion.

More than mere fact checking, I think you will find that the chief challenge to achieving sustainable independent media is the business model. Advertising necessarily biases media towards at least the class interests of advertisers (if not any particular one), or else it would go out of business. Meanwhile it has trained readers to not pay the full price of quality content. This is a fundamental problem.

Another challenge is that companies have business models that support their own PR and lobbying while ordinary citizens do not. That is unless they are organized and combined resources, but with the dissipation of unions there is no strong popular economic counterpoint to corporate PR. This is part of our news system as well.

I very much hope some good work can be done here, with a sober and clear understanding of the fundamental challenges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Risk-Out-Democracy-Communicati...

A way of seeing through the propaganda is what I would call realism-based-education. By that I mean reading "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann, "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky, and "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, to start. Reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli would also be a good companion to these, though its focus is quite different. Reading these quick and easy to understand books has done more for my worldly education than going to college when it comes to building critical thinking.

People need to understand that mass media is for placing ideas into your head for the purposes of influencing future actions-- no more, and no less.

But its much easier to control narrative if there are only few outlets. And now in post-truth world average Joe doesn't read anything but facebook, or some rage broadcast.

Read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, to see why the funding has stopped.

I recently finished the whole lot of Foundation from Asimov, Zero to sold from Arvid Kahl and I'm currently reading "The wealth of Nations" from Adam Smith (Gotta admit, it hurts).

The motivation behind alternating between pleasure and technical is to try to increase my knowledge (even though I feel like I retain 1% of what I read), and to enjoy reading too (with the pleasure book)

On my to read next list, I have:

- High growth Handbook (Elad Gil) (Pleaure book)
- Utopia - Thomas More (Technical)
- Beyond the rift - Peter Watts (Pleasure)
- Manufacturing consent (Noam Chomsky) (Technical)
- Children of time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

For instance, the work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent documents how mainstream news consistently reinforces government narratives, even when they are based on lies (Iraq, Vietnam, etc). These organizations you mention are in fact propaganda outlets intended for foreign audiences or literally government agencies, they don't regularly directly criticize US foreign policy on other than a tactical basis.

The Jeff Bezos story is an example of the larger story of media consolidation where the majority of US media is owned by a handful of corporations. How often will such news organizations report conflicts of interest or report critically on their bosses?

The establishment position is bloodthirsty. That's a big point of contention.

[0] Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, updated in 2008

According to On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, democracies fail all the time easily. You go to sleep in a democracy, you wake up the next morning in a fascist state. You lose rights, you lose the ability to vote in elections, and then within a month you're in a "state of emergency" aka a fascist state for the next 12 years (Germany) or still to this day (Russia). Snyder's book shows that tyranny or fascism is a deliberate systemic process.

Link to truth decay article:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/opinions/truth-decay-opinion-...

If this were the NYT they'd probably tell Arrington he couldn't run the story because it'd interfere with either their ad sales or else their access to sources. For example, just look at how/why they covered up their knowledge of the warrantless wiretapping until after Bush got reelected.

Whereas with Arrington there's no one to tell him he can't do it because it's his blog, and because he's not part of some mega corporation the chances of a story like this killing the revenue of some part of his empire are infinitely lower.

Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.

Wen it came out in 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent rattled the accepted view in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America that journalists’ relationship to power was essentially adversarial. Instead, they argued, the institutional structure of American media — its dependence on corporate advertising and sources in the upper ranks of government and business — created a role for the press as creators of propaganda. Without any direct press censorship, with full freedom of speech, the media narrowed the political debate to exclude anything that offended the interests of the market or the state.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/matt-taibbi-interview-fai...

The whole thing is on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5631882395226827730...

(Better yet, read Chomsky's book on which the documentary is based, "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media".)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism

It's also worth referencing Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent which lays out the playbook for propaganda posing as journalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Edward Bernays: Propaganda or the movie "version": Century of the Self (both on archive.org, btw Adam Curtis is about as underrated as Robert Fisk -- no means by accident)

Manufacturing Consent (same spirit movie as in the thread)

Understanding Power (basically they simplify and reiterate stuff backed up in this book)

And and if you are still reading this, have fun reading Dictators, by Jacques Bainville.

In their research they describe the dynamics between the government, corporations, and the media. As they show, it's not so much a conspiracy, but instead it's part of the political economy.

"I keep slipping back into believing the United States government believes in honesty and transparency..."

The U.S. government never believed in honesty and transparency and you're lying to yourself thinking that they did. Our press has constantly manipulated us. Lies and secrets are just getting easier to expose.

I suggest you read the following:

- A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn

- Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky